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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."