Chris Cooper wears a Rolex Day-Date

Chris Cooper's character in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood wears a Rolex Day-Date in yellow gold, a watch with a presidential reputation and a slightly tangled origin story. People will tell you it became 'the President' when Dwight Eisenhower wore one. He didn't. Rolex gave Eisenhower a Datejust in 1951, five years before the Day-Date existed. The watch that earned the nickname belonged to Lyndon Johnson, the first president to wear a Day-Date, a yellow-gold one, the same configuration Cooper has on. By 1966 Rolex was running an ad that called it, flatly, 'The Presidents' watch.'

The film is Marielle Heller's, from 2019, with Tom Hanks as Fred Rogers and the story built around a cynical magazine writer, Lloyd Vogel, who is loosely modeled on Tom Junod, whose 1998 Esquire profile 'Can You Say... Hero?' the movie draws on. Cooper plays Jerry, Lloyd's estranged and largely fictional father, whose deathbed reconciliation with his son is the arc Rogers helps along. He sings at a family wedding early on and is dying by the end. What nobody has explained is the watch: there is no costume note on the Day-Date, and no clear shot of it in the stills.