Anita Roddick

Presenter0:01

B B C Sounds Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Speaker 20:05

Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast. For rights reasons, the music is shorter than on the original broadcast. The presenter is Roy Plomley. I hope you enjoy listening.

Speaker 10:17

Radio 4, now the time is 12.15 and we come to Desert Island Disc.

Speaker 10:28

I'm sorry Seem to get our music a little wrong there, but let me tell you the castaway is introduced by Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:35

My castaway this week is someone who in 12 years rose from being an unknown housewife to one of the most successful businesswomen in the country. Her achievement is based on two things, a brilliant idea and a dynamic personality. The idea is called the body shop, of which there are now more than 300 all around the world, selling herbal oils and natural creams to millions of women and indeed men. The personality is called Anita Roddick.

Presenter1:03

Anita, I was going to say that you were one of the richest business people in Britain today, but you really can't bear that tag, can you? You got it very fast. I tell you why I can't bear it. It's because it's so irrelevant. The only positive aspect of wealth is that you never have to worry about paying the bills. But if you don't have a life which encourages leisure, you haven't been trained for a leisure time or leisure activities, it actually means very little. And certainly in my own work, nothing has motivated me less than money. What has motivated me more is seeing how far I can push an idea. So the work ethic in you is very strong. It's been there since...

Speaker 11:40

Uh

Presenter1:42

I think since my father dies and when we had to work as kids. You've also been called a product of Thatcher's Britain because you're someone who's been given the right economic climate i i in which to enable your ideas to flourish. But you don't much care for that tag either. I can't quite understand that. You see

Speaker 11:56

Where

Presenter1:59

It's nothing to do with government or it's nothing to do with an attitude. There's a hell of a lot of lip service paid to entrepreneurship in this country and to initiative. But really, when it comes down to it, the bottom line, I would know of nobody with little collateral that can set up a business in this country to get real greenfields money. They always have to have a house or they have to have somebody backing them. So there really isn't the stature.

Presenter2:25

idea of you know you can do anything. What works is it's like being a ha a genie you know in a bottle that you can't stop. That you put the cork and out comes the cork and you you push this idea further. Presumably then peace and quiet and solitude on the desert island is going to be hell for you. I think it will probably be slithers of death. At the loss

Presenter2:46

Of human contact. Loss will be the theme of my life, so I mean, and the only memory, so I will, I will hate it. But music might offer you some light relief.

Presenter2:55

Yes, it'll have to. There's not going to be much else, is there? All right, let's hear the first one then.

Presenter3:01

Music speaks very personally to you and as long as I'm suffering I want music to accompany me with that. And it's the RF Mbacchianas Brasileires by Villa Lobos.

Presenter3:39

The Aurea from Bacchianos Brasileiras, number five, by Villa Lobos, Sally Terry with Larindo Almeida. It's lovely, but it's not going to cheer you up much, Anita. Are you going to try to escape? No, I'm not. The sea offers more terror for me than being stuck on a desert island. And I'm not a very good swimmer, and I never swim outside my depth, so I shall have to survive in misery.

Presenter4:03

Right, let's go back to the beginning. You were born Anita Pirella. Your parents are Italian. Yes. You were born here in Britain, though. Yes, in Little Hampton. And they ran a cafe. They did indeed. What sort of cafe? Well, it was all the Italians. They either went up to Glasgow or to Edinburgh or they stayed along the south coast. We had a family, two branches of the family. We did everything that was very normal Italian. We had the ice cream factory and we had all the caps.

Anita Roddick4:13

Well it was

Presenter4:26

And it had its jukebox and it had Knickerbocker glories. Everything was aluminium. Everything was like the American diner. And my first understanding of graphics and illustration was the old Coca-Cola posters. We all worked in the CAF because my father had died. And that's where really I got my education in terms of business. But it was where everybody met, the kids were there, people's courtships were started, engagements flourished. You were really at the hub of the social scene. It was just magic. But that was where this work ethic began. You seem to be saying that that was where you gained this understanding that you only get out what you put in. Exactly. I mean, there was no alternative. You didn't work, you didn't eat. And my mother had four kids to support. And you see, why the Italians survived and why all immigrants survive and do well is because they worked damn harder. I mean, we were at open at five o'clock to do the fisherman's breakfast and closing at 12 o'clock when the last trippers went back to London. And we knew how to serve. We were there. There was no option.

Speaker 14:54

Banda can witness

Presenter5:25

Your second record, please. My second record is such good memories, is La Bamba and by Los Lobos. And I love it because I can remember us all hugging the jukebox or going down to Butland's or when the fairgrounds arrived in and hugging the dogem cars because all the good looking guys were always looking after the dogem cars. It's just good memories and I would dance to it because I love dancing.

Anita Roddick5:57

La ma la la la la

Anita Roddick6:07

Um la pokale gracia pa mi pazi ya yari la yara.

Presenter6:16

La Bamba from Los Lobos. Anita, were you a clever girl at school? Were you innovative? I was incredibly innovative. I wasn't that academic. I worked my buns off. I loved school. I was a teacher's delight and loathed, I'm sure, by so many of the other kids because I would breathlessly leave school on Friday and think, now, what have I learnt this week? You know, like, you know, big ears and sissy or naughty. Hello, big ears. How have you had a happy day? And I would be so delighted with all these new pieces of knowledge. Did they know? I mean, did you know then that you were going to make ripples? You were going to do something? Absolutely. Absolutely. Because you see, so what do you want to do when you're 13 or 14? You want to be a movie star, you want to be a rock star. But basically, what you're saying is you want to be different. And when you lived in Little Hampton, which really only needed a bit of tumbleweed to make it more deserted than it was at some stages, and you wanted to be different, I think my teachers encouraged that. But you trained to be a teacher, which was very orthodox. No, it wasn't in one respect. But you think about it. So it's a platform. It's a stage. And every teacher I know that's a great teacher is a good actress. The worst teachers in the world are those boring ones that just sit a mouth out of textbooks, which ought to be fine. But no, I loved teaching because it was an opportunity to just perform. So by the early 60s, you were just leaving your teens. Yes, it was absolutely the right, ripe time of liberation for you to seize in this movie described. I loved it. I went into college and everything was, oh, it's so boring because I loved it. I loved it. Life was like that. But you had to suffer, you see. And suffering meant going to Paris. And that was just a joy because it was time all the jazz musicians were there, the expatriates. And I met people like Miles Davis. And I worked in the New York Herald Tribune. And I just, you know, and then I gather you went round the world with a Swiss millionaire. Yes, I suppose I did. My whole life has been either brilliant or absolutely god-awful relationships. And I've learned, my whole experience in education is how I've learned through other people, never in a book.

Speaker 17:12

Today

Anita Roddick7:36

Death

Speaker 17:41

Yeah.

Presenter8:21

If I fell in love, I lived. You know, that was it. And it was a wonderful, wonderful person. He taught me everything about the cinema. And he had a brother who was a bishop who could not get over the fact that I wore mini skirts. This is 65, could you believe? So we, yes, we traveled around the world. And then you met Gordon Roddick, a penniless poet, and we'll hear more about him in a minute because I'm going to ask you for another record. To anticipate that little story, I've chosen Julian Bream playing part of the Rodrigo's guitar concerto. And I've chosen this because it sums up the only time of my life when I used to pause and had something special happen to, which in fact was meeting Gordon. And I think this record more than anything was right for that time.

Presenter9:35

Julian Bream playing part of Rodrigo's guitar concerto. So it was 1968 and you met the penniless poet Gordon. Was it love at first sight? I'm sure it was. I mean I'd just come back from this heart-renderingly miserable relationship. My last words as I left Zambia or Lusaka was I'm going to fall in love with the first penniless poet there was and there he was in my mum's club, bearded and tattered jeans. And I can remember pursuing Gordon for about four days solidly up and down Little Hampton beach, you know, and I, you know, at 26 or 27, I can't remember what age I was then, you know, I have come to a stage in my life when I've been traveling for God knows how many years and I thought, you know, let me just see, let me go down another path. And what I wanted, what I was desperate for, was a sort of not casual conversation, just incidental conversation, just not being stressed by what I was saying or how I was conducting myself. And it was fabulous. Had a great life. He now, of course, is the financial wizard of the company, the chairman to your managing director. It must be very difficult working alongside you. Oh, it's so easy. I cannot understand why nobody else thinks it's easy. Number one, it's a lot of pillow talk, so it's great. So we don't need any more, you know, certainly more directors on the board. I mean, we make up for about six. Number two, he's incredibly supportive. When I really feel I ought to be fired or done some dumb things, he'll always show me a different viewpoint. But we also are very well behaved and we're also incredibly polite. My territory is different from his territory. And there's a sort of code of ethics of behavior. And there's an intimacy which is fun occasionally. No, I find it very, very easy. And he does all the things I find hideously boring. And so that's fine. But if anyone had told you two 20 years ago that one day you'd be one of the most successful business couples in the world, would you have laughed at them?

Speaker 110:42

Uh

Anita Roddick10:42

Yeah, it's a

Speaker 211:20

But

Presenter11:33

I don't know. I think we would have been successful at something. We enjoyed working together. I think we were cut out for doing something special because we work so damned hard. I don't think I'd have been surprised. Business, yes, because I mean I have profit and loss sheets that leave me cold.

Presenter11:48

And I think for him too, because he came up from a very different background from mine, you know, it just shows that you don't have to come up from conventional backgrounds, i.e. go to Harvard or work in the city to run a very good company. So you met in 68, as you said, how long before you actually got married? Ah, that was a problem because we got married a little longer, maybe two years later. We got married in Reno. We had Justine, our eldest daughter, and, you know, we thought this is, we didn't want to get married. I still don't think we're legally married in this country anyway. And we decided that we were going to go and buy a banana plantation in, I think, Australia. And I got pregnant with Sam and we said, I went to spend a few months on the west coast with some friends. And while we're tracking around, we stopped in Reno and he said, let's get married. And being Scott, he wouldn't pay for one of those marriage parlour weddings. So we stopped at the town hall. I can remember to this day thinking, they haven't even asked me for my birth certificate or my passport. And the guy took us in. I was pregnant with Sam, took a brownie photograph of us and pronounced Gordon and me man and wife and said, if you hang about for another three weeks, you can get divorced. And our honeymoon was spent in a motel playing with our friends because we couldn't afford two rooms, playing Snap.

Presenter13:03

That's it. That's a character of become your fourth record, Anita. My fourth record is a pause now because it's really come up to date in my love for this type of music. It's the Pat Muthini group with To Detract from the First Circle.

Presenter13:47

The Pat Masthini group playing If I Could.

Presenter13:50

At what point then, Anita Roddick, did you conceive of the idea of homemade lotions and potions? When Gordon said he wanted to take a couple of years off and travel from Buenos Aires to New York by horse, and so we were running this hotel, so we had to sell that. And then I thought, well, with two kids, as they were fairly young then, I had to do something that was controllable. So a 9 to 5 shop was so easy, so I thought. And I knew nothing about what I wanted to put in the shop other than what I'd seen when I'd been traveling. And I'd spent a year traveling and often during that year, spending the year with families and island communities and saw how they washed their bodies and hair and lived the way they did. And so I used as a building block for the ingredients the plant that I'd seen. It's a strange thing though, because you don't strike one as being the sort of woman who is or would ever have been particularly interested in beauty. I'm absolutely not interested in the West perception of beauty or the industry, the beauty industry at all. What fascinates me to the quick is the sort of an anthropological. I'm totally curious about what people do, how they act, what they think. I mean, I love seeing, and even to this day, just watching how they, you know, how they shine the body, how they scrape off the dirt. And it's a great international language between women. So how did you go about setting it up? So I did it the traditional way. I went, you know, we had the money for the, obviously the hotel, the collateral there, so it wasn't going to be too difficult. But I went about it totally wrong by getting, not wearing as I'm wearing now, jeans and I think I had a Bob Dylan t-shirt and going to the bank and asking for 4,000 and babies on the back and in the pram and no, no, no, you can't have it.

Speaker 214:45

Yeah.

Speaker 114:45

Can you

Presenter15:34

Being smart?

Presenter15:35

I dragged Gordon along the next time and we got the money.

Presenter15:40

We had the plastic sheet, we had the profit and loss sheets, which is an absolute sham, but we got the money. You know, I think anybody who's got an idea, if they take a couple of courses in debate or rhetoric, you can get anything. And that's that's why I think debate ought to get back into school curriculum. And where was the name, the body shop? That's uh, that I picked up in the States. Every garage has a workshop attached to it to repair broken fences. Well, exactly. It's all about kind of repair jobs.

Presenter16:11

But why did you think it would do for a cosmetics shop? Well, it's to do with, you know, the shop that I found in Brighton had a very small shop front and I couldn't get along like the Brighton and Health Skin Care Company, so I had to think of three short words and that worked very well. I tell you, the whole of this company was set up on brilliant accidents, no less than that. The fifth record. The fifth record is Bruce Springsteen and Dancing in the Dark. It's such a great memory for me in my wonderful garden. And it was a hot summer about three years ago. And I played this and the kids were with their friends and everybody, independent of each other, just started dancing. I love it.

Anita Roddick16:50

Change my clothes, my hair

Anita Roddick16:56

I'm just living a dope like this, there's something happening somewhere.

Anita Roddick17:03

Baby, I just know we can't start a fire.

Anita Roddick17:09

Can't start a fire without a response

Anita Roddick17:13

We have

Anita Roddick17:16

Even if we're just dancing here

Presenter17:20

Bruce Springsteen and Dancing in the Dark. Talking about all the recipes you collect from other societies there, Anita, I mean, will you find ever anywhere, I wonder, the secret of eternal youth? No. You'll find probably by the end of the century a couple of ingredients that you can plaster on the face that may, through a sort of abuse on the skin, swell it up as the first day of sunburning will swell up the skin. But what about the hands? What about the ankles? And what about the knees? And what about the elbows? What about the neck? And what about the neck? What about the way you walk? I mean, you know, what is... I get so mad at the cosmetic industry. I get so mad at cosmetic advertising. I don't know one cosmetic scientist of 55 or 65 that looks 20 years younger. Going over to the States, as I'm doing a lot now, everybody has tucks and eye jobs and faceless. So, you know, I'm not a believer in a mixture of oil and water, which is all it is.

Speaker 117:50

What about the

Presenter18:20

Going onto the skin and doing that.

Presenter18:22

You have, as I've said, more than 300 shops across the world, but you only directly employ about 500 people. How does that work? Because we franchise. Now, that happened because we had no money. Every successful aspect of the body shop started because we had no money, and self-financing was the way we went, because after I opened up my second shop in Chichester, there was no more money at all. So people were coming to me and saying, or females saying, what a great idea. So why didn't you open up one in Bath or Bristol? Well, fine, you do it yourself. I haven't got the money to do it, basically. And we didn't know it was called franchising. So you've just... You supplied the staff. All we ever did was, in the old days, we built it. I mean, we had our little garden fencing, which you green paint, and we filled up the bottles, handwrote the labels. But we actually, to this day, still make our money from supplying the products. But they work harder because they've got a vested interest. Well, and also it opens, I don't know about you, but you find such a reservoir of energy when it's your own business or your own idea. And so we would then have stopped being a huge mammoth personnel company, employing, I think we now have about 3,000 or 4,000 people in the country. You've been criticised, of course, though, at the same time, for treating your shareholders, because you're now a public company, with scant regard. You know, you seem to be more interested in the environmental future than I get into trouble about that. But, you know, basically, I'm not saying it's misquoted. I certainly wasn't misquoted. I think the emphasis was wrong about my disregard for shareholders. I'm a major shareholder. My staff is shareholders. What I get, I'm always getting mad, about people who are speculators, the big financial institutions that may well come in and then after two weeks sell the shares because they make a big fat profit. I have no obligation to them at all, at all. And my only concern is running a company and keeping it alive and keeping it alive by caring about things like the environment, like the community.

Speaker 118:56

What you said

Speaker 119:39

And I don't use it again.

Presenter20:17

Your next record. My next record is Holding Back the Years from Simply Red because it sums up to me, you know, the search that I'm constantly looking for. And I was in Turkey trying to find out why all our sponges, which we buy from southern Turkey, was diseased. And I was on this fishing boat and just waiting for the first crop of sponges to come up. And I was sitting there waiting, and I was listening to this record.

Anita Roddick20:42

Get to me the sooner I lay.

Anita Roddick20:49

I'll keep old and long.

Presenter21:09

Holding back the years from Simply Red. There's another dancer. It's wonderful. That'll be my big regret. One of the big regrets on the island is thinking what I've missed and it will be hearing Simply Red in concert. How else do you relax other than dancing? I'm very visually satisfied. So movies, I love going to the movies and theatre when I make the effort. Music, not so much. Music for me is when I'm travelling, when I'm on my own, I spend a fair amount of time travelling, about two months a year. And when I'm travelling, and I'm usually on my own, i.e. I'm not with people I know, then I'm always wearing my Sony Walkman and playing music. And when you're in these god-awful beds in these villages or crashing down on the floor somewhere, then you can lull yourself to sleep. But nothing like, not needlepoint or crochet or anything like that, no. I wouldn't have thought so. How do you find time for your family, your children in all of this success? And indeed, is it success if you don't find time? Well, they're older now, they're sort of 18 and 16. And now I'm desperate for their time. And of course, they don't want to hand it to you at that age.

Presenter22:15

I mean they're great at emotionally blackmailing me and saying, God, why weren't you like a normal mum and being home? But when I was home, they're never around or they didn't want to be around. I think my life for them, I mean, my gift to them is to show them that you just go down every route, every opportunity. And I hope they've taken that. I think more so the sadness of not spending time at home is not for the kids because we're always available, but it's for my own mother. I know, I know, I don't know about you, but.

Presenter22:47

I kick myself every week saying I should have spent more time with my mum. You know, I just should have. And she's so undemanding, which is naughty in a way. I have the impression that she's part of the secret in all of this, because the image one has is of this little lady constantly arriving at your front door with arms full of freshly ironed linen.

Speaker 122:58

Yeah.

Anita Roddick23:05

Yeah.

Presenter23:05

Yes! And she used to go into, oh god, she used to go into lyrical excess about, how does anyone want to buy a pair of knickers for a start? And she always buys me these terrible knickers. My kids call them nappies, you know, because she doesn't want me to get kidney problems. And they're so big and then she seams them up the sides. I don't know, because she just likes buying these god-awful knickers for me to wear. Gordon said, on your travels. Oh, anywhere. I mean, I've got the ugliest underwear in the world.

Presenter23:34

Let's have your seventh record. My seventh record is you two from the Joshua Tree and I think this is a very personal record because it seems at this very time in my life to sum up a lot of what I'm going through or feeling.

Anita Roddick23:50

City walls, these city walls

Anita Roddick23:57

I'm glad to be with you

Anita Roddick24:02

But still

Presenter24:18

You too seeing I still haven't found what I'm looking for. That was such that's another great little memory from a couple of weeks ago because I've just returned from the Himalayas and we've got a project going on making paper out there and the Jeep I was driving kept on breaking down so I spent you know half of that 10 hours getting up into this this post up into the in the mountains just walking and playing this music and I remember sitting on a boulder just looking at the Himalayas and being moved to a degree where I don't think a Bible or a work of organized Christianity could ever move me.

Speaker 124:49

Or a

Presenter24:54

You've been Anita elected Businesswoman of the Year and the Body Shop has been the company of the year.

Presenter25:01

I wonder though i if there isn't a fundamental contradiction here really that you the the the CND marcher the woman who spoke up for the deprived as you've described

Presenter25:11

And you've always viewed the marketers with contempt and now you are being applauded by the capitalists and you are being given an OB on the recommendation of Margaret Thatcher. Yes, it's a bit of a problem, isn't it? You know, in a way, I'm really appreciative of all, you know, of recognition. You know, when this type of success comes to you at the age that it's come to me, you actually have to view it differently. I think in the end result, I'm motivated by myself. I want to push the idea. And I'm very, very determined that I will not become like the big fat cats in the industry. And if it makes small gestures like insisting that I don't travel around on, you know, Concorde or whatever it is, that's fine. That's a small little gesture. That's good enough. But the other bigger gesture is how I deal with the profits and the responsibilities of them. And just keeping everybody in the company breathless and excited and looking at different ways of doing things. You know, I have such disrespect for a lot of the standard ways of conducting business, the roles of business people play. And it's surviving to you. I mean, the company is surviving brilliantly along the routes that we've taken. And to those women at home who think they've got a brilliant idea, but they don't really believe they can pull it off like you've pulled it off because somehow they'll never have your luck. What do you say? Well, I don't know about that. There is obviously an element of timing, not luck, timing. I think if you've got the support of your family, as I had, this extended family unit, and of your husband, which I had and still have, 90% of your problems have gone. If you don't, that's a dreadful situation.

Presenter26:51

I don't know. I think it depends. The difference between, I think, somebody being crazy and an entrepreneur is very little. I mean, the only difference is that I can convince people of the vision or the idea that I've got. And I think if anybody at home's got the idea, the idea becomes obsessive. And you run after the idea. So you have to really be a weenie bit crazy. Let's have your eighth and your final record, Anita. My eighth and final record, this is a joy. This is a gem. I think one of the best Western white blue singer I've ever come across, Mary Coughlin, an Irish lass. And I was introduced to her by a friend of mine, Graham Dean, an artist. And we were stuck in a seedy bed and breakfast room with his wife and another couple after we'd returned from his exhibition in Cardiff. And we were talking about environmental problems and what he was going to do in terms of doing some illustrations and designs for us. And he said, listen to this. And it's...

Presenter27:50

Ah, it's everything. It's wonderful. It's called seduce.

Anita Roddick27:53

I want to be seduced

Anita Roddick27:59

I want a man to take me out to dinner.

Anita Roddick28:04

I like to say his eyes get moody Thinking about the thought of what flirts

Anita Roddick28:14

Connor too, I want him to be real cool.

Presenter28:19

Yeah.

Presenter28:20

Mary Cochrane singing seduced quite a raunchy number in. Wonderful. I mean it's everything I'm going to miss. Lack of contact, lack of intimacy, lack of experience, oh, lack of, lack of, lack of, lack of love, whatever. Is that the one that you're going to keep?

Anita Roddick28:24

Yeah.

Speaker 228:24

Hi, yeah.

Anita Roddick28:24

Uh

Presenter28:35

I don't know. I know I'm going to have to choose one.

Speaker 128:36

Yeah.

Speaker 228:36

Doing

Presenter28:39

I was debating whether I needed words or I needed sounds and I think in the end it'll have to be sounds and I would think the one I would choose would be the Patmutheni one if I could, yeah, that's why. Do you ever stop for long enough to read a book? Yes I do. I mean I've travelled so much and I'm always in aircrafts and I'm always in waiting in airports.

Presenter28:59

And that's for me when I catch up with everything. So what book can we supply you with on the island? Other than the Bible. It's going to be wonderful. It's a book by Pat Conroy, and it's called The Prince of Tides. Now, you have to read this in hardback because the weight of it weighs your, you need that physical weight because it's physically heavy on the soul as well. And it starts, the first sentence is, my wound is my geography.

Speaker 129:02

So what

Speaker 129:04

Other than the bargain issue.

Presenter29:25

It fairs brilliantly between tragedy and farce and

Presenter29:29

Oh, I love them. Keep you going with them. Yes, it certainly would. And your luxury, Anita. Now, that's been a problem because it was either going to be a never-ending supply of basil, then a telescope, then I thought, what really will I want? I've plumped for the most wonderful, comfortable bed with plump pillows and white cotton sheets.

Presenter29:50

And why not? Anita Roddick, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island is.

Presenter29:56

Thank you.