CURSE OF THE £15 MILLION WATCH
Haunting story of the most elaborate watch ever made – and the man who wished he’d never owned it
THERE were few wealthier men in the United States than Henry Graves Jr. Born into an august banking family, he had spent his life accumulating a multi-milliondollar fortune by investing shrewdly in railways and banking. Like many rich men, Graves liked to collect objects as well as money. While most ordinary men collected stamps or coins, he acquired holiday homes, modern art, motorboats and expensive watches.
His favourite boat was his 50-foot speedster, the eagle, on which he liked to potter around the Upper Saranac Lake in upstate New York. One afternoon late in 1936, Graves took out the eagle with his daughter Gwendolen, who found her father in a morose mood. Her eyes widened when he pulled a large watch out of his pocket and looked at it intensely.
‘Such things bring one nothing but trouble,’ said Graves, who by then was in his late 60s. ‘Notoriety brings bad fortune.’ Gwendolen knew that this was no ordinary timepiece. It was the ultimate expression of her father’s obsession with collecting watches and, in particular, those made by the Swiss firm Patek Philippe.
This week, that watch broke records at auction when it was sold by Sotheby’s in Geneva for £13.4 million to an anonymous bidder. With auction house costs, the mystery buyer will have to fork out a total of £15.1 million.
It comes as no surprise, for the watch is commonly regarded as the most important ever made, the ‘Holy Grail of Horology’.
Graves had been buying watches from Patek Philippe since 1903, and by 1910 he had started to commission them. Many were engraved with the family’s coat of arms.
But he wanted more than mere engravings to make his watches special. He wanted his Patek Philippes to be the most complex watches in t he world, i ncluding as many ‘complications’ as possible — the horological term for any feature of a watch that goes beyond simply showing hours, minutes and seconds.
Such was his obsession that he started competing with James Ward Packard, a luxury car manufacturer, to see who could produce the most impressive timepiece.
Graves secretly approached Patek Philippe i n 1925. He wanted, he insisted, nothing less than ‘the most complicated watch’ on the planet, one that was ‘impossibly elaborate’.
What followed was, in the words of author Stacy Perman in her book A Grand Complication, ‘a nearly eightyear odyssey’ in which teams of Patek Philippe’s craftsmen, scientists and engineers did, indeed, create the most complicated watch made before the age of computer-aided design.
They spent three years researching the project and five years making the watch.
In total, the timepiece — with two clock faces, one on each side — has 24 complications. One shows the phases of the Moon, others the times of sunset and sunrise in New York and even the pattern of the stars each night above Mr Graves’s apartment in the city. There are complications revealing the days of the week, an alarm, a stopwatch and a perpetual calendar.
Grave’s masterpiece blew Packard’s out of the water. Packard had got there first and his was the first watch to feature a sky chart, including 500 golden stars, centered above his home in Ohio.
Yet the masterpiece that became known as the Graves Supercomplication never brought its owner the pleasure he expected. Far from it.
AFTER he had taken delivery of it in 1933 at a cost of $15,000 (about £650,000 at today’s prices) the Supercomplication seemed to bring him not only unwanted attention but great misfortune — so much so that on the eagle on that day in 1936, Graves cut the engine of the boat and looked from the watch to the water.
‘What is the point of being wealthy and owning such objects if something like this could happen?’ he asked his daughter.
It was the time of the Great Depression, and Graves had become a figure of public resentment after people who were starving and destitute discovered that he could spend thousands on such luxuries.
But the banker believed the watch had brought him far worse than opprobrium in the public prints. In fact, he became convinced that it had come with a deadly curse.
Just seven months after Graves received the watch, his best friend died. And worse was to come.
In early November 1934, Graves answered the telephone to be told that his youngest son, George, had been hurtling in a car down a boulevard in Pasadena, California, and crashed, killing himself.
The news was devastating, and made even worse by the fact that Graves had lost his eldest son, Harry, in a car crash in 1922 when he was just 25 years old. For Graves, the Supercomplication was a bad talisman, something that was meant to have brought him j oy but had, instead, ushered in grief and hateful publicity. At one point he had come close to selling the watch, but decided against it.
As the boat bobbed in the water, Gwendolen watched her father pull back his arm. In his hand was the Supercomplication and he was about to throw it into the lake.
‘No, Daddy!’ Gwendolen implored. ‘Let me hold on to that. Some day I might want that.’
Graves slowly let his arm fall to his side. Gwendolen reached forward gingerly and took the watch from his hand, then put it in her pocket.
From then on, Gwendolen held on to the watch. Her father lost interest in an item that he had craved all his life — a life that was to end in 1953, when he was 86.
After his death, Gwendolen inherited the Supercomplication and in 1960 passed it to her son, reginald ‘Pete’ Fullerton, who sold it to an industrialist from Illinois for $200,000 — some £1 million today.
Until 1999 the watch was displayed in a museum in Illinois, then it was sold to a private collector by Sotheby’s in New York for $11 million (about £10 million today).
The auction house will not be drawn on the identities of either the seller or the buyer. But both will for ever thank Gwendolen Graves for stopping her father throwing the world’s most extraordinary timepiece into a cold lake in upstate New York all those decades ago.