Across the Sea
In 1928, as spring turned to summer, Florence and Henry Graves, Jr., sailed to Europe aboard the RMS Olympic, the grandest ocean liner of the White Star Line. The sister ship of the ill-fated Titanic, it weighed nearly 47,000 tons and its hull, at just over 882 feet long, ensured that the Olympic was the largest vessel at sea. It was also the most glamorous. Henry had booked passage on the ocean liner simply because it was the best. The Graveses had chosen to forgo Eagle Island altogether and instead spend the season among the glitterati on the Continent, with no agenda other than pleasure-seeking—although, for her part, Florence planned to remain in front of New York society’s fashions. Her husband, it appeared, intended to stay one step ahead of James Ward Packard.
Over six days plying the Atlantic, Mr. and Mrs. Graves, as did their ilk, passed the time exploring the Olympic’s more sumptuous quarters, ignoring the ship’s exotic novelties such as the mechanical camel in the fully equipped gym and indulging in more familiar diversions. Under the molded ceiling of the first-class drawing room, Florence immersed herself in the delicate pursuits of a proper gentlewoman, writing postcards, doing needlepoint, and reading. Henry availed himself of the ship’s male haunts, such as the opulent Turkish bath. Enjoying the proximity to the sea, together they sauntered along the promenade, breathing the salty air. Even engaged in such informal activity, Henry commanded deference among his peers. His obvious polished bearing suggested a gentleman of substance who lived extremely well—or at least one who had mastered presentation as a vocation. Dressed in one of his bespoke three-button, four-pocket jackets, razor-edged trousers the color of cream, his straw boater, and a tie carefully knotted around his collar, he blithely strolled the decks. With a jaunty hand on his hip, he casually nodded to the other passersby with Florence by his side; emancipated from the corsets she had worn during the early years of her marriage, she now donned a fashionably low-waisted dress, t-strap shoes, and a sun hat.
Florence Graves relaxing with Henry and one of her favorite pastimes, needlepoint. Courtesy of Cheryl Graves.
At sunset, the pair changed into their evening finery. Henry dressed in tails and top hat, while Florence wore an au courant French frock. Stepping onto the upper landing leading to the first-class reception room, they were bathed in the purplish nocturnal light streaming through the massive dome of wrought-iron and glass. Although making an entrance never appealed to Henry, taking one of the three elevators hidden behind the stairway meant missing another opportunity to appreciate the immense grand staircase that fanned out at each landing and to walk past the intricately carved clock made of oak that depicted Honor and Glory Crowning Time by Charles Wilson.
The couple’s evenings on board followed a ritualized set of manners. After dinner and perhaps a dance, Florence accompanied the women for small talk and coffee in one of the ornate drawing rooms, while her husband repaired with the men to the first-class smoking lounge, where they relaxed, unshackled from the bonds of Prohibition back home. At the end of the evening the couple retired to their private suite, where Louis XIV-style décor was bolted to the carpeted floor, a subtle reminder that this grand hotel was in fact a massive ship gliding across the ocean.
Arriving in Cherbourg, Henry and Florence boarded a first-class train and headed south for an extended European stay through the fall. The couple planned to spend much of their time in Paris based at the Hôtel de Crillon. There, Henry, officially “retired,” could still conduct some private business at the branch of Bankers Trust Company on the Place Vendôme, Florence could visit the couturiers, and both could sip aperitifs side by side at the Ritz Hotel bar on the Rue Cambon. The pair also cut a decadent swath across the most exclusive resorts along the French Riviera and the Swiss Alps, with a side trip to Geneva, where Henry had some personal business to attend to.
• • •
The crescent-shaped Lac Léman appeared sapphire blue against the snowy peaks of the Alps when Henry and Florence arrived in the dry June heat. The belle époque paddle steamers cut across the lake that Mary Shelley, her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron had immortalized in prose and poetry following their scandalous summer in 1816. At the water’s edge, the Jet d’Eau spewed a stream of water nearly one hundred feet into the air. It wasn’t Henry’s first visit, but much had changed.
A drowsy village masquerading as an international city, Geneva gently unfurled at the foot of the Alps, a postcard of French style and German efficiency. Rows of little shops, ateliers, luxury jewelers, chocolatiers, stone churches, cobbled alleyways, and medieval ramparts gave way to grand châteaus. A watchmaking capital and the cradle of global private banking, Geneva had Protestant ethics and Calvinist leanings that made it a city of money and piety, with aristocrats, craftsmen, and a contained elegance. By the time Henry and Florence strolled the Rive Gauche, Geneva had also become a safe harbor for the world’s moguls and their growing fortunes.
During the Great War, Switzerland’s stubborn neutrality, outsized army, and mountain fortress had left Geneva largely unscathed. In the war’s aftermath, the city lost none of its calibrated restraint. With the establishment of the League of Nations, Geneva was made the seat of international diplomacy. The city of loupe-eyed watchmakers and bowler-hatted bankers was now a global village of pinstriped functionaries.
• • •
Henry made his way to the five-story building overlooking the lake at the Quai Général Guisan housing Patek Philippe’s headquarters and manufacturing workshops. With the type barely set on the headlines announcing James Ward Packard’s death, the crank on horology’s war of complications was to turn yet again, even though it was nearly impossible to escape Packard’s legacy. Among the national flood of obituaries describing the automobile pioneer’s life, many were filled with breathless accounts of his remarkable watch collection. As the New York Times noted, “Mr. Packard’s hobby was collecting clocks and watches . . . some of which were not duplicated anywhere in the world.” Word of his final commission, the exceptional astronomical watch, the Packard, had begun to spread even before its deathbed transfer to the Horological Institute of America. In death he had been anointed America’s preeminent horological connoisseur.
In Ward’s passing Henry could see more than just a moment of reflection; this was an irresistible opening. Approaching sixty, Henry had lost none of his competitive nature. Even as the newspapers crowed over Ward’s watches, Henry’s greatest timepiece, the Supercomplication, was undergoing the laborious process of turning dream into reality.
On March 5, before he departed for Europe, Henry had made another trip to Tiffany & Co. to collect his latest complicated pocket watch, which he had commissioned some three years earlier, at the height of the Graves-Packard steeplechase. Patek Philippe had delivered the eighteen-carat gold open-face keyless winding watch, with movement no. 198052, to the jeweler. For this highly complex minute repeater, the one with eleven complications, Henry paid $2,700 (equal to $36,375 today). Admiring the exquisitely complex craftsmanship, Henry was not yet satisfied.
In Geneva, entering the doors at 41 Rue du Rhône, Henry would be ushered through the Salon Napoleon III. The ground floor salon d’exposition was the size of a small Fifth Avenue ballroom and smelled faintly of rose oil and leather. Hanging prominently against the sculpted paneling and above one of the main glass cases was the famous large gilt-edged oval displaying the many medals of honor Patek Philippe had won over the years at the various World’s Fairs and timing competitions.
Along the back wall stood the elegant, enormous, former Tiffany vault, with its painting of a bald eagle grasping a pair of American flags encircled in stars. The vault was a vestige of Tiffany & Co.’s short-lived adventure in Geneva and its later joining of forces with Patek Philippe. In 1872 Tiffany had established its own factory at the Place Cornavin, said to be the largest of its kind, as part of the jeweler’s grand experiment to marry American mass production with the Swiss tradition. Four years later the factory was shuttered and sold to Patek Philippe, and the two parties entered into a five-year contract. Tiffany agreed to amplify its representation of Patek in America and service its watches. For its part, Patek assumed control over the Cornavin factory and agreed to service Tiffany watches in Europe.10
In the workshops above, some of the watchmakers sat in front of their face-lathes boring holes in bridge plates; others polished and oiled the tiniest of parts, all of them robed and silent, going about their work as if dedicated monks in the service of a greater power. Given Henry’s elevated status as one of the house’s most important clients, he was likely whisked upstairs to one of the private salons with its spectacular view of the lake. Small pleasantries were exchanged. Hands were shaken. Henry sank back into a regal wood and velvet chair. His visit coincided with the end of the three-year period during which Patek Philippe’s watchmakers had considered his watch’s intricate design and the bench had just turned to its actual production. As with his previous complex pieces, Henry approved drawings that led to the next steps, a prototype, and manufacture.
Henry had at least three complicated pocket watches in various stages of manufacture, including two rare platinum tourbillon minute repeaters. While at the maison, however, he appears to have turned his attention from pocket watches to the increasingly popular wristwatch.
Patek Philippe had entered into one of its most vibrant periods, taking the lead in miniaturizing popular complications for the wristwatch. In 1922 the watchmaker introduced the first single-button split-second chronograph, followed three years later with yet another first: the perpetual calendar wristwatch. By 1927 Patek had begun producing the first wristwatch chronographs with and without split seconds. In Geneva, Henry acquired some of the first of what would be a tremendous trove of wristwatches. On this trip they included two Tonneau-shaped minute repeaters, one encased in eighteen-carat gold and the other, which he took receipt of in August, in platinum, both engraved with the Graves family crest. The earliest minute repeaters of Henry’s collection, these timepieces were also some of the earliest that Patek Philippe had manufactured.
In a nod to one of his other passions, Henry had also arranged to purchase a coin-form watch. It too was one of the first of its kind that Patek Philippe had ever crafted. Made from an eighteen-carat gold U.S. $20 coin minted in 1904, the watch, with the movement no. 812471, had a secret latch embedded in the coin’s edge that triggered a minuscule spring to reveal a gold watch dial with blue steel hands and Breguet numerals in black enamel.
Just days before Amelia Earhart took off on her transatlantic flight, Henry picked up a copy of the most recent Observatoire de Genève and, with his wife, boarded a train and crossed into southern France. On June 20, 1928, they arrived at Nice’s grand Hotel Ruhl. Rising like a frothy white wedding cake on the Côte d’Azur, the hotel was a sun-splashed carnival for the wealthy on the Riviera, long the fashionable playground for a set of global habitués. Here Coco Chanel had introduced the scandalous idea that a suntan was a mark of wealth and health and not the province of low-class laborers. Before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Ruhl’s casino had drawn a regular parade of Russia’s grand dukes and duchesses. Under the Beaux Arts coffered ceiling, they had piled stacks of gold francs on the roulette tables, tossing a few to the lucky croupier. Dripping in jewels and poured into the finest couture, the oligarchs had thrown dinner parties and spent with abandon. By the time Henry and Florence descended the Ruhl’s curling stairs in their Parisian couture, the Russians had been supplanted by wealthy American plutocrats and their magnificently turned-out wives, who now mingled with Europe’s aristocracy, ordering exotic flowers and choice wines and throwing a few gold coins at the croupier for a bit of luck.
Each morning Henry and Florence rose to a petit déjeuner of coffee and croissants on delicate china spread over crisp linens. Their days fit inside a postcard. The couple relaxed under the Mediterranean sun along the palm-fringed Promenade des Anglais or sailing on the sea. They exchanged pleasantries and afternoon tea with their circle. These gentle amusements apparently did little to soothe Henry’s spirits, as he had left Geneva somewhat unsettled and fixated on another timepiece. While in Geneva, he had read through the Report of the Observatoire for 1927–28 and learned of a tourbillon chronometer awarded the “First First Prize” in the timing competition at the Geneva Observatory. It was made by Vacheron Constantin, and Henry could not get it out of his head.
Pulling a sheet of hotel stationery from the bureau, Henry sent off a handwritten note to Messrs. Vacheron and Constantin in Geneva, inquiring about the availability of the piece. The oldest watch manufacturer in the world, in addition to royals and other luminaries it had crafted pieces for the industrialist John D. Rockefeller, men of letters Henry James and his brother William, and of course James Ward Packard. Yet Henry was not among Vacheron’s long list of wealthy and powerful patrons and ostensibly remained unaware of Ward’s relationship with the house. To date, Henry had remained largely faithful to Patek Philippe, but as summer turned to fall he engaged in an intense correspondence with Vacheron Constantin. Like Ward before him, it appeared that Henry had found a new object at which to direct his ardor.
Arriving at the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris on the evening of June 23, Henry received word from the watchmaker that the piece was indeed available. The very next day he replied, “I will purchase the chronometer.” He also inquired about when he might receive the piece, noting its price and taxes. Over the coming weeks, he remained utterly consumed with the goal of possessing the prizewinner. As he and Florence flitted from one glamorous resort to the next, he continued to correspond with Vacheron Constantin. Each letter demonstrated his growing enchantment and impatience. He worried over the watch’s “safe delivery” and obsessed over its “Official Bulletin Rating,” insisting that he receive not only a copy of the bulletin but the diploma showing the award of the “First First Prize.” He also requested certain changes to be made to the watch. He wanted a gold dial rather than enamel, and his preferred blue-steel hands. He dictated precisely how the inside cover of the case, the cuvette, should be engraved, and he asked that the movement number be displayed on the new dial. Finally he wrote, “Please have the watch cleaned and freshly oiled before delivery.” Anxious to possess the watch, he did not agonize over its price, $1,000 (about $13,400 today), or any additional charges his requests might add to the final invoice. With each dispatch, Henry eagerly invited Vacheron to respond with its acknowledgment “at your earliest convenience.”
With such a potentially important client, Vacheron Constantin remained solicitous, assenting to each new request and desire. Also befitting a house of such stature, it remained discreet. Increasingly restless, Henry instructed the firm to send the watch via special messenger to the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris, agreeing to pay the firm $50 to do so. This way, he explained, “I would be assured of the safe delivery to me of the watch without unnecessary jarring.”
On Friday, July 13, 1928, Vacheron Constantin’s emissary arrived. Charles Constantin, the great-grandson of François Constantin, the watchmaker’s cofounder, delivered the watch personally. The two men would have repaired to one of the public salons among seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tapestries, arranging themselves on the gilt and brocade furniture, not far from where Queen Marie Antoinette had taken piano lessons a century earlier. Constantin produced a fitted wooden box, and Henry reached for his spectacles. Barely keeping his impatience under wraps, he sprung open the box and examined his shiny new toy. At sixty millimeters in diameter, sixteen millimeters wide, and 117.25 grams, by pocket watch standards the watch was rather large. The case was made of solid eighteen-carat gold and in the Louis XV style with a gold empire dial. Henry pressed his thumb gently against the watch’s side, unlocking the case to reveal the cuvette. The engraving was exactly as he had requested: Awarded First First Prize (866 Points) Geneva Astronomical Observatory Timing Contest 1927–28, No. 401562, Henry Graves Jr., New York, by Vacheron & Constantin, Geneva, Switzerland.
Henry was pleased. And it appears that Monsieur Constantin was intrigued. His great-grandfather had adopted the motto “Do better if possible, which always is possible.” This meeting offered him an opening. Henry Graves, Jr., had two tantalizing qualities: he was a man of precise tastes obsessed with watches (preferably those with diplomas from the Geneva Observatory) for whom price was merely a detail. Constantin gently coaxed this initial flirtation further. The great watchmaking houses had built their legacies over the centuries fawning over and winning favor with important clients from popes to kings and now the modern royals, America’s industrial princes. Constantin mentioned that the atelier had produced a unique skeletal watch, exceptionally thin, with a dial of rock crystal, its movement forged out of fourteen-carat gold. Crafted entirely by hand, it was quite simply a tour de force of artistic brio and technical workmanship.
In a letter dated July 18, 1928, Henry followed up with Vacheron Constantin. Delighted with both the chronometer and the way the watchmaker had carried out his wishes, he reminded the maison of his expressed interest in prizewinning timepieces. “Also do not forget,” he wrote, “to advise me if you ever produce a watch that secures from the Geneva Observatory a higher record than the chronometer I have just purchased.” As his return plans to America were still in flux, he asked that Vacheron send him a leather case and spare mainspring for his prizewinner, in care of the Banker’s Trust Company in Paris. The skeletal watch that Charles Constantin had so delicately mentioned intrigued him. Vacheron had made only two. Henry asked the house to send him further details.
By the last week of July, Henry and Florence had pushed on to St. Moritz, settling into the exclusive Hotel Suvretta House, nestled in the alpine woods with glorious views of the Champfèr and Silvaplana Lakes on the Chasellas Plateau. There he received not only a letter from Vacheron Constantin and the information he had requested but also a series of photographs that showed the skeletal watch’s front, back, and side. Although exceptional, the piece did not strike his attention, as he had hoped. As for the other Observatory pieces Vacheron mentioned in its letter, he replied curtly, “[They] do not interest me at all, but when you produce one that secures from the Observatory a better record than the one you have just sold to me I would then be interested to hear from you at my New York address.”
Henry dismissed the skeleton watch, despite its intricate beauty and complexity. He was in this for sport, and the skeleton, though beautiful, possessed no record. But Henry had missed one fine detail. In the photo series that he received, the hour hands were designed to form the initials of its owner, the man who had first commissioned the piece. In blue steel the letters were J and P.
• • •
On October 24, 1928, Henry and Florence boarded the RMS Olympic at Cherbourg for the return trip home. They had been away for nearly six months. Sailing through rough waters, the couple watched the Normandy Coast recede into the sunlight. As they crossed the Atlantic, the Woolworth Building was about to end its reign as the world’s tallest building, and Henry was about to begin his as the king of haute horlogerie. They stood on the first-class promenade blissfully unaware that their shimmering world was winding down its final days.