Roddick: my 'open marriage'

Anita Roddick's garden is something to behold. In fact, it's not really a garden, it's more of a sculpture park. In one corner is a huge, bronze-coloured, cut-in-two face. And on the ridge, next to the vines for her home-made champagne, is a set of bronze tepees.

Later, when Roddick whirlwinds me around the garden, she tells me these sculptures are all made by local people, scraping a living. She shows me her "peace" tree. It is a towering fir and encircling it on the ground are plaques which read Love, Peace, Harmony, Prosperity. The rest of the garden is full of heavy glass-coloured balls. "Fishermen use them," she says gleefully, "and I recycle them."

Roddick is, of course, all about recycling. She came to prominence in 1979 as both the brains and the brawn behind the Body Shop; the shop with the revolutionary plastic, refillable bottles of edible-smelling shampoos and balms. It all happened by chance, apparently. Roddick wasn't an eco-warrior then. She was a mother with two young children to feed and an absent husband, Gordon, who'd gone off to travel around the world for two years, and she had no money.

She'd travelled a lot before having children and picked up a few handy hints along the way. "Well," she says, "I found out that the Bedus [Bedouins] hate hair on the body. They hate it, so they use a combination of things to remove it. I showed them my pubic hair, and they gave me the recipe. That's how things have always worked for me. I trade for secrets."

Anyway, she made a few of these natural products and put them in plastic bottles and sold them from her West Sussex home. Then she got a bank loan of a measly £4,000 and found a shop in Brighton. "I hand-wrote the labels because I had no money to print them. We offered to refill the plastic bottles as I had no money to buy more." The rest is history.

When she and Gordon gave up overall control of the Body Shop - a gradual process which started some years ago when the company went public, and became final earlier this year, when they relinquished the joint title of chairman (although they are still on the board as major shareholders) - she publicly voiced her dissatisfaction with the new regime to anyone who'd listen.

At one point she said she was "having a horrible time" and that the new CEO was "someone I do not get on with at all". The regime has since changed and the Roddicks are still on the board. "Yes, that was a horrible time and thank God it's changed," she says now.

"The worst thing I ever did was bring in management consultants because they are all arseholes. The CEO had no idea what Body Shop was about. I was viewed as an eccentric and treated as such, as if I was a loony or something. No one listened to me. They're all ruled by economics. Since when did economics get to rule the world? What about human values? I have a pile of products I sourced that would have given small communities money and jobs. Do you know what? I don't give a toss about seaweed this or peppermint that. Now I care about campaigning. The Stop the Gulf War campaign - I insisted on that. The powers-that-be were not happy but I made that happen and, yes, people complained but it made me very happy that we did it."

She doesn't seem that happy, though. She says she has a "great sense of humour" but appears far too committed and intense to ever find the time to laugh. Being on her home territory doing those endless, boring, paperwork involved tasks we all have to do, is obviously driving her mad. She can barely sit still, perched like a twitchy, long-haired rabbit on a stool in her capacious kitchen. She seems terribly Italian - dark skin, dark hair; earthily sexual rather than dry and intellectual.

Her housekeeper has brought in a tray of food - smoked salmon, Serrano ham, crackers - but she barely touches anything. She leaps up and down to show me things: the life-size, freaky, pretend doctor that stands just inside the doorway, the photographs of herself, looking so happy and radiant and calm surrounded by an assortment of tribesmen, and the myriad works of art on her walls.

She dashes in and out of endless catacomb rooms. "This is Gordon," she says, showing me a painting of an attractive older man on a polo pony. "It looks just like him," she says. "It's by a Chinese artist I met. He used to be sent out by the government to paint people in the countryside in China but now he's big in the States. I couldn't afford him now!"

The Roddicks met 32 years ago in a cafè/bar run by Anita's Italian mother, Gilda, who brought her four children up alone after divorcing her first husband, Donny, and remarrying Henry, his cousin. Until she was 18, Roddick thought Donny was her father. It turned out it was Henry, with whom her mother had had a long affair. "I was relieved," says Roddick. "Donny was irascible and Henry's relations were circus people." Anyway, she met Gordon at her mother's behest.

"It was an arranged marriage," says Roddick. "I'd been travelling the world and my mother kept writing to me about this Scottish poet and when I returned she got us together. I remember thinking Gordon was attractive but really I wanted to have a baby. So we got together and argued about who had travelled, and read more and three months later I was pregnant. It felt right to have a baby."

This is, of course, where Roddick's life splits in two. She was, and is, so determined, so full of opinions that it is impossible to see how others - her children, friends, for example - could possibly have fitted into her life. She said to Anthony Clare, in 1996, on his Radio 4 programme In the Psychiatrist's Chair, that her relationships only ever lasted two years. She says she gets very excited when she meets people and then tires of them quickly.

Roddick claims she knows this about herself now. "I have just turned 60," she says, "and I know everything about myself, and I now wonder if I was a bit intolerant in the past. But it's hard when you feel you have so much to achieve." Isn't it a case that she took what she needed from people - their enthusiasm and commitment and, having reaped that, was no longer interested in them? "It's not that," she says. "I don't really need friends. I don't feel truly happy unless I'm being nomadic and nomads do not create restrictive, reliant relationships with others."

Friends get left by the wayside. What about her children? There are photographs of Roddick with her two daughters, Justine and Samantha (32 and 30 respectively), everywhere and even more of her with unbearably cute grandchildren. "I'm a better grandmother than mother," she concedes. "I have more time now. I didn't have time then; I was working. I refuse to feel guilty about that.

"Do you know how many other women have children and go out to work? Everyone - well, at least I was at home with them until they were five and then my mother was around and then they went to boarding school and were very happy."

But they weren't. Justine, who now lives in California with her children and works for the Body Shop, was once so unhappy that she faked illness and had an operation to remove her appendix when there was nothing wrong with her. Was that an attention-seeking device?

"Of course it was," says Roddick impatiently, "but that was because she didn't like her first boarding school. Once we moved her she was fine." But why didn't Roddick, who counts herself as "a very intuitive woman", pick up on her daughter's unhappiness? "I was busy," she says, "and I was travelling and, to be honest, Justine is not like me. She's like Gordon. I always know what's going on with Samantha. She is just like me, always protesting about something."

She also didn't seem to have the faintest idea that, a couple of years back, her husband was having a pretty full-on affair with thricemarried PR Kelly Luchford. Roddick always said her heart would break if he left her.

The marriage went through a rocky patch for a year. Luchford's friends
declared that Gordon and Kelly were "in love". Roddick said that when she claimed they had "an open marriage", which many people picked up on at the time, she didn't mean sexually but intellectually. Eventually it all blew over.

"When I said we had an open marriage what I meant was that we each have different and separate interests. Gordon loves polo and golf and they bore me. I spent six months travelling with a vagrant in the States to highlight the causes of poverty and Gordon did not want to do that.

"We give each other the right to enjoy our own pastimes without crippling each other. But we have been together a long time and it would take a miracle for us to split up." Does she trust him? "Of course." She looks a little tense. The other issue that used to bother her - among the many global themes of poverty and the environment - was her diminishing sexuality.

She was 34 and pretty when the business took off and was always known for being famously disarming. "Oh, the flirtatious stuff," she says, "of course I knew I was being disingenuous. When I started out, people didn't think I could be a business woman. But I had to be pretty savvy to get everything off the ground so I'd do the womanly thing and then lay down the law."

She's still at it. She gets asked to address meetings full of spicandspan American business men. They think she's going to talk about the global expansion of her empire (more than 1,800 stores - she and Gordon are millionaires many times over) and she walks in and harangues them for an hour, about Shell and the Ogoni tribe before, now about Gap's policy towards child labour. "My granddaughter goes in to Gap in the States and asks the shopkeepers what the policy is. Isn't that amazing?" To Anthony Clare she said she was tired of being so strong and wanted someone to hold her and make decisions for her and ... what? Treat her like a woman for once and not this steely force in front of me?

"Oh, I don't care about that any more," she says. "No one's going to fancy me now and it's completely freeing because all those ridiculous games can stop."

I wonder if the implication is that Gordon hasn't protected her? "Oh, he knows I'm timid," she says. "I'm terrified of water. I once went to rout illegal logging and Samantha insisted on coming with me and everything got really hairy. I had to cross these huge ravines on logs and not be seen by the loggers, who are a violent lot. I sent Samantha back. I was scared for her and it made me feel vulnerable. I learned something then. Always travel alone."

But she's still as immovable as a rock. She says she is profoundly happy with what she does and who she is. She went to the World Trade Organisation demos in Seattle and got shot at. She helped fund training in non-violent direct action prior to the May Day protests. She believes we only get one pop at life and this is hers. When she dies she wants her female friends to carry her coffin and fall off their high heels.

In the here and now, much has been made of the fact that she and Gordon are leaving their money to charitable causes and not to their children. "Sam's always being asked how she feels about that. She says, 'I don't think about it as I do not like to contemplate my parents' death.'"

"Samantha, I imagine, knows there's not the merest hint of a chance that her mother might change her mind. Nor is there any chance that she'll ever slow down. There's still so much to do," she says. "I used to want to change the world. Now I just do what I can for small groups of people for whom it makes an incredible difference. I campaign for the people in the world who don't have a voice."

But when we walk around the peace tree she tells me maybe she'll end up like her 89-year-old mother. "She's nuts," says Roddick, "and everyone loves her. For Samantha's wedding she came downstairs on a stretcher carried by four transvestites. Can you see me doing that?"