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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."