Richard Burton wears a Patek Philippe Automatic

Vincente Minnelli's The Sandpiper (1965) put the most famous married couple in the world on a Big Sur beach: Richard Burton as Dr. Edward Hewitt, headmaster of an Episcopal boarding school, and Elizabeth Taylor as the free-spirited painter raising a son alone. Eva Marie Saint plays Claire Hewitt, the headmaster's wife, who teaches at the school, and Charles Bronson is the sculptor Cos Erickson. Michael Wilson and Dalton Trumbo wrote the screenplay; Trumbo had been one of the Hollywood Ten, blacklisted after refusing to testify before HUAC in 1947, and had already won two Academy Awards he could not collect, one presented to a front writer for Roman Holiday and one to a pseudonym for The Brave One. The film's theme, "The Shadow of Your Smile," won the Oscar for Best Original Song, and Tony Bennett's recording took the Grammy for Song of the Year.

Hewitt wears a gold wristwatch through the film, with a champagne dial on a woven bracelet. The identification is honest guesswork. The one costume study to examine it reads the watch as probably Burton's own, possibly the Patek Philippe automatic Taylor was said to have given him during Cleopatra, while conceding that a Patek Philippe would be a conspicuously rich piece for a school headmaster. The gift story itself is slippery: the Taylor-to-Burton watch documented elsewhere is an Omega Constellation in yellow gold, not a Patek. So the gold watch on the headmaster's wrist keeps its question mark.