I started in merchant banking in the early ’70s, moved to New York City and Los Angeles in 1980, and founded two financial businesses, one in the film industry.
This was a completion-guarantee company that helps independent producers to raise money from banks. We insured against the eventuality that the film wouldn’t be completed. It became the main way for independent producers to make films for 15 to 20 years in the States and the UK. We had our own accountant on the set every day watching the budget; so, while I was there, we never had to trigger the insurance.
It grew after I left, and these companies went on to do some major award-winning films, like The Emperor Waltz. It was enormous fun, and I made some enjoyable connections.
I returned to London in 1986, and primarily managed UK public financial-services companies for 25 years, remaining a non-executive director of a few public companies for some time later.
My childhood was idyllic. I had wonderful parents, and a younger brother. I grew up in suburban London in the 1950s, studied at Dulwich Prep, and moved to boarding school at King’s, Canterbury, in 1960. I was extremely happy at both.
We always spent the Easter and summer holidays in Greece. My parents were both religious Greek Orthodox, and my father, who had been highly decorated in the war, served the Greek Church in London all his life, and was made an Archon of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. An Archon is like the Catholic title “Prince of the Church” — but, in the Greek Church, it is not hereditary. My family helped found the Greek Orthodox cathedral here, and my father co-founded St Andrew’s, in north London, for the new Greek Cypriot community.
In 1967, Greece was taken over in a fascist military coup, which lasted until 1973. All students like me were passionate against this, especially in the birthplace of democracy. We were actively doing everything we could to help undermine the military government. When it fell, there was rejoicing throughout Europe and the West.
As a youthful director of a UK merchant bank, I was privileged to work directly with Konstantinos Karamanlis, Greece’s greatest Prime Minister, and Governor Zolotas, later President of the Republic, to raise a large and critically important loan for the Bank of Greece in 1976 — the first after the fall of the military government and the return of democracy in 1974.
Karamanlis came back from exile in Paris. I was very active in the international markets, raising money for governments; so I was able to get involved. When Greece entered the EU and got the euro, it became much more stable, but, in the financial crisis of 2008, Greece bore the brunt of the pressure on the euro, and entered a terrible period of austerity. In the last few years, it has done increasingly well, with a good, effective government.
As group CEO of Aitken Hume International, and then as executive chairman of Johnson & Higgins, I opened offices in Athens to access the Greek shipping community, and I still have family business interests in Greece.
I retired from my last non-executive directorship of a public company last weekend, but I want to carry on writing. I’ve wanted to write since childhood. I wrote for school magazines, and had an op-ed article published in The New York Times.
When I was in LA, I recruited Carl Foreman as our figurehead chairman of our film-finance company. He won the best-film Academy Award for The Guns of Navarone and best screenplay for High Noon. He told me a true story that formed the basis of By Victories Undone, which I originally wrote as a screenplay outline, but was encouraged by Norman Mailer to write as a novel. It sold well in the UK, reaching number one on two London bestseller lists, and was optioned twice for a film that was unfortunately never made.
Norman was a friend for most of my life. I met him in 1980, because our wives were best friends. Norman and I became very close until his death in 2007. Although he was 15 years older than me, we were incredibly close, he was like an older brother, and he gave a lot of time to helping me get started as a writer.
Marked Cards was a memoir which came out in 2022, and it’s really lots of anecdotes about other people I met in LA and New York and London. All my life, I’ve been boring people at dinner parties with them; so a publisher said to me, why not write a book? I was amazed — who’s going to buy it? But it was incredibly well received. It’s not about me, of course. It’s about other people.
My daughter is becoming a successful illustrator, and she asked me to write a children’s book for her to illustrate. I’ve learned in the last 18 months that it is not easy to write children’s books, but it’s truly wonderful to remember and look again at the world through the eyes and with the mind of a child.
I got the idea of setting a whodunnit in a school for squirrels in St James’s Park, with rival schools in the London parks, and other animals as teachers. There’s going to be at least two more. It’s a sort of children’s Agatha Christie, and, yes, it does have a message. The school was founded centuries ago by a squirrel who had grown up in a monastery in Northumbria. He founded with five rules, a bit like the ten commandments: lessons in life. One is: In silence there is wisdom.
I was good at telling stories to children, but I was aware that my writing style is quite grown-up, and had to find out that simpler language works as well. As you get older — I’ll be 76 on 19 December — you start to appreciate the sort of things children appreciate, like birds and animals. I never used to notice or like birds this much. Now, I’m becoming obsessed by them. We come full circle, don’t we?
I read all the classic children’s books as a child, and classic adventure stories as a young teenager. I still love them all: from Enid Blyton to C. S. Lewis to Rider Haggard to Victor Hugo to Sabatini to Antony Hope to E. W. Hornung to Leslie Charteris.
The main reason I was sent to King’s, Canterbury, was because the High Church of England is identical in dogma to the Greek Orthodox Church, and I was allowed to take communion there. Archbishop Ramsay and the Patriarch had many meetings together in Canterbury during the early 1960s to bring the two Churches closer together, and my father attended most of them.
I was an altar boy at St Sophia Greek Cathedral, but my first experience of God was in the immediate aftermath of my mother’s death in my early twenties. I felt it in the enormous tranquillity and peace that came over me during the last rites, and then afterwards in the short service which the Greek Bishop conducted at home by my mother’s bedside.
I grew up in both Churches — both cathedrals, actually. I celebrate Christmas on 25 December, as do both Churches. I still attend both Churches, but mainly for major religious and family events. We go by the Justinian calendar, whereas the Anglican Church goes by the Gregorian calendar; so Easter only coincides every few years.
Hypocrisy and discourtesy make me angry; not much else any more. My family and the few friends I have left make me the happiest.
The sea in Greece is my favourite sound.
My children give me hope for the future. I constantly pray that I may die before my wife, children, and younger brother, and constantly ask God to protect them.
If I was locked in a church for a few hours, I would like it to be with my father and mother, because it would remind me of being a child. I have a very strong memory of being in church with them as a child.
Emmanuel Olympitis was talking to Terence Handley MacMath.
Whispers in the Park is published by Quadrant Books at £15 (Church Times Bookshop £13.50); 978-1-7384598-6-5.