DENNIS ROBERTS PUTS THE JEEPERS ON CELEBRITY PEEPERS
Rock star Elton John, the Optique Boutique’s most conspicuous consumer, sparked the rage for gaudy spectacles.
Sammy Davis Jr.’s pair has his name sculpted in rolled gold script on the earpieces and costs $300. Sixty of the Fancy Stones likes gold, too, but the bridge is adorned with the symbol of Islam.
So far, Elton John has spent $25,000 on dazzling spectrum-ranging frames — the rhinestone-encrusted star shapes to a $5,000 extravaganza that spells out his name in 57 battery-operated blinking mini-bulbs.
Whether they suffer from severe myopia or merely a mild sensitivity to sunlight, Dennis Roberts’ customers can eyeball the most spectacular money can buy. As founder and operator of Los Angeles’ seven-year-old Optique Boutique chain, Roberts, 28, is credited by fellow opticians with making the style of a man’s glasses as important as his image.
Aside from fitting glasses to the shape of a client’s face, about the only personalization an optician traditionally bothered to suggest was frame colours (usually neutral) to harmonize with skin tone. But, says Roberts, “nobody took the time to ask, ‘What do you want to look like?’ ‘What image do you want to project?’ Someone with a $20 haircut who puts himself in a $400 suit and a $10,000 car,” he adds, “shouldn’t just have ordinary eyewear.”
The son of a Beverly Hills surgeon, the nearsighted Roberts was himself fitted with his first pair of glasses at age 3. He still remembers those awful trips to the optician’s office with the desks and venetian blinds. “They’d start opening drawers, pulling out frames, and you were always left feeling you hadn’t seen everything they had.”
It didn’t occur to Roberts that he might engage all that until 1965, when he enrolled in Woodbury College, a Los Angeles business school, and took a job at a nearby optical lab to earn spending money. There he learned to grind lenses, build up inventory, set up work areas and even supervise them — all at a salary of $80 per week.
Roberts quit in 1968 to go it alone. Shunning the typical locale — in or near a medical building — he set up shop in a trendy Sunset Strip storefront. He started with a $6,000 bank loan and sold his motorcycle to buy a lens-grinding machine. Today, Roberts’ eight Optique Boutiques (five in the Los Angeles area and one each in Las Vegas, San Francisco and Scottsdale, Ariz.) gross well over $1 million annually. Says bachelor Roberts, who lives in Beverly Hills and owns houses in Beverly Hills, Las Vegas and Palm Springs: “There hasn’t been a dull moment.”
Roberts plans to expand next year to New York, Boston and San Francisco, and to open four or five more stores elsewhere. (The locations are Roberts’ secret.)
He planned for early retirement. He refuses to get into lucrative contact-lens business because he thinks they are potentially dangerous “foreign objects in the eye.” (Many doctors, of course, disagree.)
Celebrities account for only 2 percent of his total business, but to Roberts, who prides himself on treating doctors’ referrals and celebrities alike, they serve a special purpose. Their visibility gives prestige to his business.
Presley’s gold aviator glasses with “EP” on the bridge and lightning bolts at the temples? Elton John is a veritable catalogue of bizarre styles: his tiniest pair is made of ivory with tiny piano keyboards circling each lens. Many of Roberts’ famous customers seek merely a dash of style — Valerie Harper’s pink-tinted rectangular lenses, Peter Sellers’ hand-tooled Zeiss frames, James Garner’s large tortoise-shell glasses and James Mason’s monocle.
Roberts has also made some of Edith Head’s movie costumes and wardrobes, and designed costumes for films such as The Three Musketeers and Mod Squad.
As the trend becomes fashionable, Roberts chuckles: “Suddenly all my competitors are taking down their venetian blinds.”
— S. J. Diamond
THE VISION THEY CREATE IS MOST SPECTACULAR
By Al Martinez
Time Staff Writer
Dennis Roberts, a portly young man with a somber mien, dons a heavy pair of plastic glasses that spell “Elton” in multicolored letters and blinking lights, and leans forward.
One eye peering through a round lens in the letter “O,” the other through a square lens between the “L” and the “T,” he says confidently, “This is genius.”
He stares for a moment, letting the phrase hang, as 57 blinking mini-bulbs add a hypnotic effect to his round face.
Then he says, “This is the most unique pair of glasses ever made in the entire history of the world. They are optically perfect. They are a masterpiece of electronics and engineering.”
Blink on, blink off, blink on, blink off.
The glasses — created by Roberts for $5,000 — belong to rock star Elton John, who opens each show with them, winking and blinking on a dark stage.
They are the most expensive and certainly the most unconventional product ever turned out by Los Angeles–based Optique Boutique, a company that fashions eyewear for America’s stars.
Its list of customers ranges from Julie Andrews to Mama Cass. Sammy Davis Jr. is their biggest customer.
Caption under the photograph:
NEON EYES OF ELTON — Rock star Elton John models the glasses that spell out his name in plastic letters and blinking lights. He opens each performance wearing them on a darkened stage.
(Willis Stone photo)
Glasses
(Continued from First Page)
…tomer has, as Fiebig puts it, “600 pairs of our glasses and only one eye.”
Elvis Presley, whom Roberts first met as they were waiting in their cars side by side for a traffic light to change, owns 80 pairs, each bearing the Presley insignia of a lightning bolt and the initials “TCB” — Take Care of Business.
Presley turned down a solid gold pair of glasses featuring nude couples making love on the earpieces, but they weren’t wasted. The “Real Don Steele,” a radio-TV rock entrepreneur, bought them.
Roberts, 27, is president of Optique Boutique, which also has stores in four other cities. Fiebig, a practitioner of the optical arts for 30 years, is vice-president.
Roberts began the company in 1968 with a $6,000 bank loan. He sold his motorcycle to buy a lens-grinding machine. Today, the business is probably worth millions, but its owner declines to discuss the matter. “Eyes wear out,” he says firmly. “That’s what we’ll talk about.”
Roberts was born in Los Angeles and learned the optical trade in an optical laboratory. He met Fiebig, who taught him about optics.
It wasn’t long thereafter that the aggressive young optician joined by his partner opened a shop on Sunset Boulevard. A short while later, Steve McQueen walked in unannounced.
He was sporting custom-made eyeglasses that had been broken and repaired several times. Roberts fixed them, and McQueen later returned with more business.
Other customers were acquired almost accidentally.
Roberts goes around in denim and a vest, and is remembered for his whimsical glasses designs. He was stopped for a light on Sunset at La Cienega when a limousine pulled up next to him. It was Presley again, who rolled down the window, waved, and said he liked the glasses Roberts was wearing. He took his name and card.
Three months later, Presley, preceded by an advance man’s telephone call, ordered six pairs of glasses and an additional pair with flip-down windshield wipers — powered by a battery pack.
“He suggested,” recalls Fiebig, “that we make a pair with teeth above and below each lens that would open and close like separate mouths. We have not done that yet.”
Roberts, who is the salesman of the two, explains that John’s glasses “reflect what he is — flamboyant. I mean, he recently dyed his hair orange to match his fingernails.”
As the reputation of Optique Boutique spread, customers began dropping by. Roberts hastens to explain that most of their business — about 98 percent — comes from ordinary customers who just want good glasses. “We’re not a freak show,” he says. “This gimmickry is not selling.”
“What we create,” he adds, “has to be honest. We are not in the business of gimmicks. The extraordinary just sort of evolves.”
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