In Search of Lost Time

The strange journey of John Lennon's stolen Patek Philippe watch.

- By Jay Fielden

The watch was a birthday gift from Yoko Ono, along with a tie she knit herself.

For years, John Lennon’s Patek Philippe 2499 has been the El Dorado of lost watches. Lennon was known for collecting expensive things: apartments in the Dakota (five); guitars (one apartment was mainly for musical equipment); country estates; jukeboxes (three); and Egyptian artifacts, including a gold-leafed sarcophagus containing a mummified princess, who Yoko Ono believed was a former self. But the Patek appears to have been his one and only wristwatch.

A gift from Ono, the watch is more than anyone would ever need to tell the time. A perpetual-calendar chronograph, it is, as Paul Boutros, the head of watches at the American arm of Phillips auction house, says, a “mechanical microcomputer, the most sought after of all Pateks.” Between 1952 and around 1985, Patek produced just three hundred and forty-nine of them. The watch, which Ono bought at Tiffany on Fifth Avenue, records time in eight different ways; the dial houses three apertures (day, month, moon phase) and three subdials (seconds, elapsed minutes, date). If you never memorized the mnemonic “thirty days hath September,” no worries—the 2499 Patek hath. Its miraculous ganglia of tiny wheels and levers will adjust its readings to the quirky imperfections of the Gregorian calendar, including leap years. No other watchmaker was able to produce a perpetual calendar chronograph movement small enough to fit into a wristwatch until 1985.

What makes this 2499 even rarer— and perhaps the most valuable wristwatch in existence—is how little we know about it. Ono gave it to her husband for his fortieth birthday, on October 9, 1980, two months before he was fatally shot by a deranged man outside the Dakota. For the next three decades, the existence of the watch remained unknown except to a handful of family and close friends.