Anita The Agitator

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

"WHERE I AM, WITH MY KNICKERS at my knees . . .," begins a typical Anita Roddick anecdote, this one delivered, incongruously, to the editors of a dozen glossy women's magazines. The best of America's beauty press -- including editors from Vogue, Lear's and Mirabella -- have gathered at a swank Manhattan eatery to get a close look at the founder of the Body Shop, Roddick's fast- growing chain of cosmetics stores. She is telling them how she learned to make oud, the molasses-thick perfume worn by Bedouin women for its aphrodisiac properties. "We'll show you how to make it," a group of women in Oman finally agreed after a week of cajoling, "but first you have to show us your pubic hair." And that's how Roddick ended up with her pants at half-mast, surrounded by Bedouin women (who pluck their body hair religiously) "pointing and hooting and screaming with laughter."

Around the editors' table, you can almost hear the jaws drop. At 50, Roddick may be Britain's best-known female entrepreneur --famed for having transformed herself from a penniless hippie to one of the five richest women in England -- but she still takes some getting used to. The darling of London's City in the 1980s (she was named Business Woman of the Year in 1985), a favorite of the royal family (awarded an Order of the British Empire in 1988), a tireless + promoter of worthy causes (from development in poor countries to preservation of rain forests) and the autocratic ruler of an 893-store international- retailing empire (a new Body Shop opens somewhere in the world every 2 1/2 days), Roddick remains, at heart, a provocateur.

Visiting a Body Shop is like walking into the headquarters of a political cabal -- albeit one scented with dewberry perfume. There are slogans and messages scattered among the fruit-scented soaps and peppermint foot lotions. Exhortations to save the whales and fight for human rights shout from store windows, countertops and recycled shopping bags. Even Body Shop trucks are employed as rolling billboards for pithy slogans. Roddick's current favorite, taken from the side of one of her company's lorries: IF YOU THINK YOU'RE TOO SMALL TO HAVE AN IMPACT, TRY GOING TO BED WITH A MOSQUITO.

Having agitated Britons with high-profile campaigns touting condom use, Amnesty International and her (widely unpopular) opposition to the Gulf War, Roddick has now turned her attention to the U.S., where she has 120 stores and plans to open 40 more this year. Last summer Roddick joined with three dozen U.S. firms -- including Stride Rite shoes and Ben & Jerry's ice cream -- to form Businesses for Social Responsibility, a politically correct alternative to the Chamber of Commerce with ambitions to "revolutionize how business in America operates" by promoting such progressive policies as family leave and environmentally sound manufacturing.

Last fall she used her U.S. stores as voter-registration centers, signing up 50,000 new voters and urging customers and passersby to go to the polls. In November she opened a new store in Harlem, all profits from which will be plowed back into the community. Next week she is launching her first assault on U.S. government policy: a three-week "have a heart" campaign exhorting customers to tell members of Congress to spend less money defending Europe and more on children, the elderly, the infirm, the homeless and the unemployed.

On a recent visit to a Body Shop in Manhattan, Roddick looks more like a frazzled housewife than a cosmetics queen. But there is no question who is running the show. Dressed in a baggy white sweatshirt, sweatpants and sneakers -- her 5-ft. 2-in. frame dominated by a mass of wild, curly hair -- she circles the shop floor issuing compliments and critiques while staffers bustle to keep up. "Brilliant!" she pronounces a display of facial creams. "Fantastic!" for a pyramid of hair conditioner. But a tray of hair clips is "Tacky! Get rid of those." Later she sweeps into a meeting of store managers. "Right!" she barks to them. "What pisses you off?"

Anita Lucia Perella knew early on that she was different. The third of four children in one of the few Italian immigrant families in Littlehampton, Sussex (a fading Victorian beach resort her family dubbed "home of the newly wed and nearly dead"), she was treated like an alien by her classmates. "They never smelled garlic before we came," says Roddick. Her stepfather, who ran the first and only American-style diner in town, died when she was 10 -- a loss that was keener for Anita and her younger brother Bruno than they knew. Eight years later, their mother Gilda confessed the truth: the man they called stepfather was actually their father. Locked in an unhappy marriage, Gilda had conducted a clandestine affair with him for several years, in the process bearing him two children, Anita and Bruno, whom she passed off as her first husband's. She eventually put aside the objections of church and family, obtained a divorce and married Anita's father.

Gilda steered her love child into the teaching profession, but the pull of the '60s was too strong to keep Anita in the schoolroom for long. She spent a year in Paris clipping newspapers for the International Herald Tribune, another year in Geneva working for the United Nations, and then hit what she calls the hippie trail. She boarded a boat for Tahiti, passed through New Hebrides and New Caledonia on her way to Australia, and ended up in Johannesburg (by way of Madagascar and Mauritius). There she ran afoul of the laws of apartheid by going to a jazz club on a "black night" and was packed off to England by the South African police.

Back in Littlehampton, Anita's mother introduced her to another veteran of the trail -- a tall, thin 26-year-old Scotsman who had worked his way around the world (mining in Africa, canoeing in the Amazon, sheep farming in Australia) but really wanted to be a poet. To hear Anita tell it, she was concerned with more down-to-earth matters. "I wanted to have children and needed some sympathetic sperm," she says. "What I didn't anticipate was that I would fall in love with my sperm donor."

Gordon Roddick seems the perfect foil for Anita. With his Scottish burr and occasional stutter, he is steady where she is erratic and quiet where she is brash. London analysts believe he is the financial wizard behind Anita's success. But he is best known in Body Shop lore for a voyage he took a few years into the marriage. The young couple had just sold a struggling restaurant when Gordon announced that he wanted to fulfill a lifelong dream: to ride a horse from Buenos Aires to New York City, an adventure he figured would take about two years. Anita, already a mother of two and thinking about opening a little cosmetics shop in nearby Brighton, gave him her blessing. "I have always admired people who follow their beliefs and passions," she later wrote. "It was impossible to be resentful."

It turned out to be a costly trip. A few months after she launched the first Body Shop, Anita decided to open a second store in Chichester. She asked her bank for an $8,000 loan but got turned down. Then a friend introduced her to a local gas-station owner named Ian McGlinn, who was prepared to invest the full amount in return for a half share in the business. Anita wrote Gordon for advice, but by the time his reply reached England, urging her not to sign over half the business, the deal had been struck. McGlinn's $8,000 investment has since grown to more than $145 million.

That deal aside, the Body Shop's explosive growth became a classic business- success story -- a case history studied by students at the Harvard Business School. The original idea was disarmingly simple: package cosmetics made from natural ingredients in small containers (in the early days Roddick used the cheapest ones around, plastic urine-sample jars). But from the start she showed an uncanny flair for marketing. She had an eye for the right location -- well-traveled streets catering to mildly bohemian crowds. She hung sweet- smelling potpourri in her shops to attract trade and laid trails of perfume on the sidewalks leading to her door. And she moved quickly into franchising -- carefully vetting would-be franchisees with such offbeat questions as "What is your favorite flower?" and "How would you like to die?"

The turning point came in 1984, when Gordon decided it was time for the Body Shop to go public. In the first day of trading, shares rose from $1.30 to $2.30, pushing the company's value to more than $11 million and the Roddicks' net worth to $2 million. (By 1992 it had reached nearly $350 million.) "I couldn't believe it," says Roddick. "The accolades were so bizarre. Because what they're patting you on the back for is how much money you are worth. I turned to Gordon and said, 'Is that it? Is that the only bloody measurement?' It was then that we decided that we wouldn't sell out, that we would put up obstacles to thinking like a large corporation."

Thus began a long-running campaign to turn the Body Shop into an exemplar of what Roddick calls the new business consciousness. The Roddicks launched projects to save the whales, to end the testing of cosmetics on animals, to help the homeless help themselves. As part of their new Trade Not Aid project, they search the world for indigenous people willing to squeeze oil from Brazil nuts, make paper from water hyacinths, weave back scrubbers out of cactus fiber -- anything that could provide the natives with income and the Body Shop with sales.

The corporation's new Littlehampton headquarters, which opened its doors to the public last month, is a monument to enlightened self-sufficiency. Ventilation in the factory and warehouse is natural; there is no air conditioning. The walls are filled with ozone-friendly insulation, and timber is supplied from managed plantations that are replanted as trees are felled. Visitors are ferried between buildings by battery-operated taxis; the batteries are recharged by wind turbines.

The Roddicks take a lot of flak in Britain -- much of it fired from the left. A $5 million investment in a 10-part BBC nature series called Millennium (which began airing in Britain two weeks ago) backfired somewhat when the director, veteran documentary maker Nigel Evans, quit the series, protesting that tribal rituals were being distorted to fit the Roddicks' new-age ideals. After years of relentlessly positive coverage, the couple now find themselves a target of the British press. "They represent causes attractive to the liberal conscience," wrote a London daily, the Independent, in July. "Yet this goodness is used, remorselessly, to sell vanity products. You wash your hair in global concern. And it is debatable whether the wizened peasants on the walls are dignified or patronized."

In the U.S. the Body Shop's activism sits uneasily in airport lobbies and shopping malls, which, after all, are dedicated to commerce, not changing the world. One mall owner banned a Body Shop poster of a baby's bottom because it showed too much flesh. Another nixed a deodorant slogan urging people to turn their "armpits into charm pits" on the grounds that it encouraged homosexuality.

Things came to a head for investors one day last September when many * stockholders, reacting to a disappointing earnings report, dumped their Body Shop holdings, driving shares from $5.20 to $2.70. Gordon Roddick was furious. "It's absolutely appalling," he fumed, pointing out that the company was still growing steadily. The stock collapse earned the company first billing in a Financial Times review of the Top 10 corporate losers of 1992, and shares remain depressed. But Anita seems unruffled. She admits that she and Gordon lost, on paper, nearly $100 million, but in the next breath insists that she doesn't give a damn.

She probably doesn't. "She's a strange, complex woman," wrote Lynn Barber in an insightful interview in the Independent two years ago. "Much as I liked her, I longed, after two hours, to get away. She is like a fire sucking up your oxygen." Where does she get this burning energy? "It comes from being anonymous," says Roddick, "living in this cute, dead town." She remembers as a child worrying about death and avoiding sleep. "I didn't sleep -- I still don't -- for nourishment," she says. "Any excuse to get up. And then in the morning you wake and think, 'I've got another day.' Living that way probably means I'm less polite, less diplomatic, less patient, because I want things done, and I want them done now."

With reporting by Elizabeth Lea/London