Dear Readers,
Anita Perella Roddick, who parlayed a single, small shop she opened in 1976, selling lotions and shampoos near Sussex, England into the world-wide Body Shop Company, which she sold in 2006 to the French Company, L’Oreal SA, one of the world’s largest cosmetic companies for $1.3 billion, died recently, in September, at age sixty-four.L’Oreal acquired the Body Shops amid a growing consumer appetite for “greener” cosmetics which use natural ingredients, avoid animal testing and aim to limit their environmental impact. (L’Oreal also bought Sanoflore, a producer of organic creams and essential oils made of plants in Southern France that sells its products in pharmacies.)
Anita Roddick also promoted fair trade to provide workers in developing nations with a living wage, buying plant-based oils, essences and other ingredients from communities in developing countries.
Perhaps in a nod to her “roots”, Anita also bought products from “developed” countries like Italy, where pockets of economic poverty came to her attention.
Just in time for Holiday gift giving are four products from Calabria, in Southern Italy, which are currently in stock and can be ordered by calling 1-800-263-9746 (press #1, the website button to get a live operator in L’Oreal US corporate offices in North Carolina) to order the following Italian Connected Body Shop products by telephone or www.usa.the-body-shop.com: Bergamot Body Lotion – A cross between a lemon and a lime, this citrus scent is used in aromatherapy to wake the senses and stimulate the mind. Great for early rising. Contains community trade-sourced bergamot from southern Italy (Calabria.) 8.4 oz. #12096, $15.00.Bergamot Body Wash - #12119 - $13.00.
Bergamot Massage Oil - #17512 - $12.50.
Bergamot Body Salt Scrub – Apply Bergamot Body Salt Scrub onto wet skin in a circular motion. What’s left behind? Skin that is smooth and soft. Includes European Spa Salt (fine grain) and Bergamot Essential Oil Community Trade sourced from southern Italy. #7388, 17 oz. $24.00.***
In the big year 2000, Anita wrote “I’m starting the century with hope in my heart that we can leave the horrors of the 20th century behind us. It took me a total of six hours to travel door to door from my house in London to the killing fields of Kosovo. Six hours! An experience like that simultaneously underlines just how much the world has changed and how much of the past it still drags with it. It also reminds us of our responsibilities as global citizens.
The Body Shop funds Children on the Edge, a group which is helping returning refugees, rebuild their lives in Kosovo. There or wherever you live, the future is something we all have to nurture together…“
The Body Shop founder also wrote about her Italian Connections and how in her late teens, she learned her “Mum” Gilda Perella could have inspired a soap opera writer for an entire season:
“(My mother) Gilda Perella was born in a small village near Cassino, Italy, and came to England as a nanny when she was fifteen. She still lives in the terraced house in Littlehampton, Sussex, where I was born in 1942. It is called ‘Atina’, after her village, and has bright red window frames…When I was 18, something happened which made me realize that she was one of the most courageous and romantic women I will ever know. I was a student teacher at the time, and at college we had been researching the influence of the heredity. We were all looking back into our families to see how they had affected our characters.
One day I was standing by the electric fire in the front room… My mother was cooking in the kitchen and I called out to her: “Isn’t it sad that you and Henry didn’t have any children?” Henry was my stepfather, who died when I was ten.
My mother didn’t reply for a second, and then I heard her say, “I did.”
I was amazed. I thought, My God, “I’ve some half brothers or sisters somewhere! I said “Where are they, then?”She came into the room, wiping her hands on her apron, and just said: “It’s you and Bruno. Bruno is my younger brother.
I will never forget the absolute joy of that moment when I learned that the man who I had always thought was my stepfather – and whom I adored – was actually my real father. Everything seemed to fall into place, and it made perfect sense to me. It was as if an enormous weight of guilt had been lifted off my shoulders because I had never been able to identify with the man I thought was my father; I just didn’t like anything about him…Later my mother told me the whole amazing story. Her first marriage was arranged within the family. It was understood that when she got to England, she would marry Donny Perella, whose family was also from Atina. That was the way things were done in Italian families in those days, but a few months before the marriage, my mother fell hopelessly in love with Donny’s cousin, Henry, and Henry fell hopelessly in love with her. There was absolutely nothing they could do about it, so Henry went off to America, broken-hearted, and my mother married Donny…
My early childhood memories are intertwined with the small Italian community in Littlehampton, the Perellas and the Perillis, most of whom I was related to, and my parents’ café, the Clifton. I have no idea how or why a handful of Italian families came to settle in a small English seaside town. They just did, and they owned most of the cafes.
The work ethic, the idea of service, was second nature to us – perhaps because we were immigrants. It was just what we did. Those few cafes in the town which were owned by local people opened at nine and closed at five on the dot; those owned by Italians were open all hours.
Donny and Gilda’s first child died of meningitis, but by the outbreak of the Second World War, she had two small daughters, Lydia and Velia. Throughout this time, she had never forgotten Henry and corresponded with him frequently. During the war, he suddenly turned up in Littlehampton, where Donny had bought a café, and they began a passionate affair in secret. My mother said she begged him to give her children, and she was soon pregnant with me. Two years later Bruno was born.
When I was five, my mother took all of us children on a trip by train back to her village in Italy. We were all very surprised to find when we arrived that Uncle Henry was there. I had no idea of the significance of this, but he made a big impression on all of us. I remember him playing the mandolin in the moonlight, while pigs snuffled around in the courtyard outside.
Donny knew nothing of the affair, and my mother was able to pass off both children as his. How a naïve Italian woman could manage such duplicity - I will never know. Henry desperately wanted to marry my mother, but at first, she could not face up to the prospect of a divorce. So he went back to America, swearing he would never return unless she divorced Donny.
Back in Littlehampton, the divorce proceedings must have started, but I was not really aware of what was going on except that grown-ups would stop talking the minute I walked into the room. To big Italian Catholic families like the Perellas, divorce was a mortal sin, but my mother eventually plucked up enough courage, helped by the fact that Donny had never bothered to conceal that he had a mistress.
It was an almighty scandal: she had to argue with the priest and the family and the grandparents, but she did it – all for love. In 1950 Henry returned from America and married my mother, but he had contracted tuberculosis and was already a sick man. They only had eighteen months together before he died of a heart attack. He was only thirty-nine. Her epic romance turned into an almost unbearable tragedy.
During my final year at Newton College, my mother sold the Clifton Café, and opened her own night club in the center of Littlehampton. She called it the El Cubana, if you please. Why she could not have had an Italian night club, I don’t know. But it had to be Spanish, with castanets and straw hats hanging all over the place.
The El Cubana was the best thing to happen to Littlehampton and to my mother. It has a jukebox and a little dance floor, but most of all, it had my mother, absolutely queening it, sitting behind the bar in a cocktail dress holding court and cracking jokes in her thick Italian accent. The members adored her because she was so full of life and fun. She had never really gotten a grasp of the English language, and her malapropisms are legendary in the family.
One day I was window shopping with her and she saw a silver lurex dress she thought would be just right to wear in the El Cubana. She marched in and said: “I wanna try on the dress you got in the window. See there! The durex one.” About this time she also bought herself a little car, but she was a terrible driver. She would get quite upset if I suggested she should perhaps indicate before she was going to turn. “What for I need to indicate?” she would say. “I know where I’m going.”
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