A discovery of earth-shattering importance has shaken the world of watch collecting. After years of painstaking research in the archives of the JFK Foundation, auction house Soqor & Philtie’s has unearthed the rarest, most unique and most incredible watch in the history of the planet.
It is an intergalactic scoop of cosmic proportions. John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe had a son! The product of this legendary union, the most glamorous orphan imaginable, whose name remains a mystery, inherited a watch. The watch was given to his father, by his mother. And – you may wish to sit down, and check your pacemaker – it is a Rolex prototype: unique, previously unknown, and utterly unimagined.
It is a Double Red Daytona, Ref. 6267½, with Tropical dial, Gilded... with Exclamation Point. The platinum case features a tachymetric scale in Roman numerals, and the 19-link Gay Frères bracelet has to be seen to be believed. For those unfamiliar with collectible Rolex watches, any of these features, whether real or imaginary, can double, triple or octuple the value of a watch!
The auction house has given an estimate of 650 million dollars. Its authenticity is beyond question; it is demonstrably unique, and one can only begin to imagine the frenzy it will cause. Leonardo da Vinci, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Pablo Picasso can go back to their colouring books. When myth is multiplied by legend, they don’t stand a chance. Soquor & Philtie’s are considering employing a hologram of either Steve McQueen or Gianni Agnelli to act as auctioneer.
In the sale room, a furious, epic, Homeric battle is expected to unfold between anonymous telephone bidders, urbane speculators and discreet billionaires, all desperate to get their hands on a totally unique watch, the most unique watch ever, a peerless object with even fewer peers than all the other peerless items that have gone before. There is no doubt that the winner of this velvet-gloved brawl will be able to thumb his nose at every other billionaire on the planet.
If you don’t follow watch auctions, this may all seem rather over the top. All this hype, all the millions of dollars hanging on infinitely small details, for a wristwatch, is actually quite perplexing when you stop to think about it. But if you are remotely familiar with the scene, even as a casual observer, you will have been inured to this kind of spectacle by the recent spate of astronomical prices fetched by watches that, even five years ago, would have been considered only slightly expensive. And, like myself and many others, you will be wondering what is behind this hysteria, the monstrous sums of money involved, and who benefits from this unedifying carnival.
