Yanou Collart

Based on Wikipedia: Yanou Collart

The Woman Who Kept Everyone's Secrets

When Rock Hudson collapsed at the Ritz Paris in July 1985, the world's most famous closeted gay man was dying of a disease that barely had a name. AIDS was still whispered about. It was a death sentence wrapped in shame. And the person standing between Hudson and the pitiless glare of the international press was a Belgian woman named Yanou Collart.

She told reporters it was liver cancer.

For four days, she maintained the lie. She worked her connections in the French government to sneak Hudson's doctor into the American Hospital. She fielded calls. She managed the story. And when Hudson finally decided the world should know the truth, it was Collart who made the announcement—still protecting him even then by refusing to confirm his homosexuality.

This is what Yanou Collart does. She connects. She protects. She makes things happen in a world where the wrong word in the wrong ear can destroy a career, or save a life.

Escape Velocity

Collart was born in Brussels in 1938, into a household that would give her every reason to run. Her father was violent. He beat her. He beat her mother. When Collart was a young girl learning the accordion, her music teacher molested her. She told her parents. Her father's response was to call her a liar and force her to quit the instrument as punishment.

She notes in her autobiography, with characteristic dark humor, that she had always hated the accordion anyway.

This is the kind of detail that tells you everything about Yanou Collart. The trauma was real. The abuse was real. But she found a way to reframe even her punishment as a small victory. She was already learning to work the angles.

Her parents separated in 1955, the same year she graduated from the Université libre de Bruxelles with a degree in Greco-Roman studies. Two years later, her father died by suicide. She refused to attend his funeral. By then, she had already made herself a promise: she would never be dependent on a man.

It's a promise she kept.

The Connector

After her father's death, Collart bounced between jobs in Brussels—a stint at Admiral, work at a real estate company called Caarven, a position at a boutique. She was good at selling things. More importantly, she was good at making people feel like they were getting access to something special.

Her boss at the boutique noticed. He took her to Paris.

Paris in the late 1950s and early 1960s was the center of European culture, and Collart had an advantage that money couldn't buy: she spoke multiple languages fluently. In a city full of international business and diplomacy, a young woman who could move effortlessly between French, English, and Dutch was invaluable. She found work at companies including Bic, the pen manufacturer, building connections across the French business world.

But Collart wasn't interested in selling pens. She was interested in people. Important people. Interesting people. People who could change the world if only someone would introduce them to the right other people.

She became that someone.

War Is Over (If You Want It)

In 1969, EMI Records had a problem. John Lennon and Yoko Ono wanted to plaster Paris with posters declaring "WAR IS OVER! If You Want It"—part of their international anti-Vietnam War campaign. EMI needed someone who could make it happen. Someone who knew the city. Someone who could navigate bureaucracy and publicity simultaneously.

They called Yanou Collart.

She didn't just distribute the posters. She produced Ono's bed-in exhibition in Paris—a replica of the famous Amsterdam bed-in where Lennon and Ono had stayed in bed for a week as a form of peace protest. This was avant-garde art mixed with celebrity publicity mixed with political activism. It required someone who could talk to gallery owners, journalists, government officials, and rock stars all in the same afternoon.

Collart could do that. More importantly, she wanted to.

Through her work with Lennon and Ono, she built a roster of celebrity clients that would eventually include Paul McCartney, Kirk Douglas, Jerry Lewis, and Jack Nicholson. When these stars came to Europe, Collart was the person who made sure the right doors opened.

The Chef Whisperer

But Collart's most unexpected impact was in French cuisine.

In the 1970s, French cooking was undergoing a revolution. A new generation of chefs—led by figures like Paul Bocuse and Roger Vergé—was breaking away from the heavy, rigid traditions of classical French cuisine. They called it nouvelle cuisine: lighter sauces, fresher ingredients, presentations that looked like art.

The food was brilliant. The problem was visibility. These chefs were gods in France but unknown in America, the land of unlimited money and insatiable appetite for European sophistication.

Collart had an idea. She would fly the chefs to America. But not just to cook in restaurants. She would cook them into celebrity.

Her method was ingenious. She would identify a promising restaurant, cultivate the chef, and then arrange for them to cook private dinners for American celebrities. The celebrities got an extraordinary meal and the chance to say they'd been served by a French master. The chefs got photographs with movie stars and mentions in American magazines. Everyone got what they wanted.

Bocuse would become the most famous chef in the world. Vergé would earn three Michelin stars and train a generation of American chefs. Both owed a significant debt to the Belgian publicist who understood that cooking was only half the recipe for stardom.

The Club

By 1987, Collart had accumulated so much influence that she decided to formalize it. She launched an exclusive "club" that, for two thousand dollars a year—about five thousand five hundred in today's money—gave members access to her services.

What did that mean, practically? It meant that if you were a member and you needed a table at an impossible restaurant, Collart would get it. If you were an actor and wanted your film promoted across Europe, Collart could arrange it. If you were an art collector and wanted to see a private collection that was never open to the public, Collart knew someone.

She had to turn down most applicants. The point wasn't money—it was cultivating a network of interesting people who might someday be useful to each other. The club was a relationship engine, and Collart was the engineer.

Her connections extended to the highest levels of government. In 1989, she helped organize a summit between President George H.W. Bush and French President François Mitterrand in Saint Martin. When an American president and a French president needed a neutral location and someone to handle the details, they called Yanou Collart.

Rock Hudson's Last Secret

All of this brings us back to that hospital room in Paris in July 1985.

Rock Hudson had been one of the biggest movie stars of the 1950s and 1960s. He was the archetypal leading man: tall, ruggedly handsome, the kind of actor women swooned over and men wanted to be. What his fans didn't know—what the studios had worked very hard to ensure they never found out—was that Hudson was gay.

In Hollywood's golden age, homosexuality was a career-ending secret. Studios employed fixers to arrange sham marriages, kill unflattering stories, and maintain the illusion that their male stars were available romantic fantasies for female audiences. Hudson had played along for decades.

Then he got sick.

In 1984, Hudson was diagnosed with AIDS. At the time, the disease was almost exclusively associated with gay men, and it carried enormous stigma. To admit you had AIDS was essentially to come out as gay—and for Hudson, that meant destroying the image he'd spent forty years constructing.

He flew to Paris in secret to receive experimental treatment. A French doctor named Dominique Dormant was working with a drug called HPA-23, which showed some promise against the virus. Hudson's official cover story was that he was in France for a film festival. Collart, his publicist and friend, helped maintain the fiction.

But on July 21, 1985, Hudson collapsed at the Ritz Paris. He was hospitalized. The press started asking questions.

Here's where the story becomes a bureaucratic nightmare tangled with a medical emergency.

Dormant, Hudson's doctor, worked at a military hospital. Hudson was at the American Hospital of Paris. As a non-French citizen, Hudson wasn't allowed into the military hospital. As a doctor at a different institution, Dormant wasn't allowed to treat patients at the American Hospital. The two men who most needed to be in the same room were separated by French regulations.

Hudson sent a telegram to Nancy Reagan. He and the First Lady had been friends for years. He begged her to use her influence to get him into the military hospital, where he believed Dormant could save him.

Reagan said no.

This fact would haunt her for decades. When it became public years later, it was seen as evidence of the Reagan administration's callousness toward AIDS victims—a pattern that contributed to thousands of deaths.

But while Reagan was refusing Hudson, Collart was working her own angles. She called everyone she knew in the French government. She explained the situation. She pushed and persuaded and pleaded until finally, someone agreed to let Dormant enter the American Hospital to examine Hudson.

It was too late. The infection had progressed too far. There was nothing more that could be done.

On July 25, at Hudson's request, Collart made the announcement that would change how America talked about AIDS. Rock Hudson had the disease. He was dying.

Even then, she protected him. When reporters asked how Hudson had contracted the virus, Collart said he had no idea. "Nobody around him has AIDS," she told them. She didn't confirm his homosexuality. That secret, at least, remained his to keep.

Hudson flew back to Los Angeles on July 28. He died two months later, on October 2, 1985. His death was one of the first celebrity AIDS deaths, and it forced the American public to confront a disease they had been happy to ignore when it was killing anonymous gay men.

The Last Great Courtesan

Food critic Ruth Reichl once called Collart "the last of the great French courtesans—but for food and friendship instead of sex."

It's a striking phrase. Courtesans, in the historical sense, were women who traded on their beauty, wit, and connections to gain access to power. They were confidantes to kings. They influenced politics through pillow talk and strategic introductions. They survived by making themselves indispensable to men who could have discarded them at any moment.

Collart took that model and stripped out the sex. What remained was pure connection: the ability to know everyone worth knowing, to remember what they needed, and to make matches that benefited everyone involved. In 1988, the American diplomat Pierre Salinger—who had been John F. Kennedy's press secretary—called her "the best connected person in France and perhaps all of Europe."

She never married. In her 2019 autobiography, Les Étoiles De Ma Vie (The Stars of My Life), she wrote extensively about her decade-long affair with the Italian-born French actor Lino Ventura. Their relationship lasted from 1972 to 1982. Ventura was married the entire time.

There's something fitting about this. Collart built her life around connections that operated outside official channels—the introduction that couldn't be explained, the favor that couldn't be acknowledged, the relationship that couldn't be public. She was the person you called when you needed something done quietly and well.

Still Connecting

In 2021, at the age of eighty-two, Collart was honored for raising more than two million dollars for Meals on Wheels. Her method was characteristically Collart: starting in the 1970s, she flew French chefs she knew to New York City and auctioned their services at charity events. Then she used her celebrity connections to ensure the events were packed with famous faces willing to write large checks.

She took a charity that feeds elderly shut-ins and turned it into a glamorous occasion where the rich could bid on private dinners prepared by Michelin-starred chefs. Everyone got something: the donors got status, the chefs got exposure, the charity got money, and Collart got to keep doing what she'd always done—connecting people in ways that made everyone feel special.

PETA has also honored her for animal activism, adding another thread to a life that has touched celebrity, cuisine, politics, medicine, and charity.

She still lives in Paris. She's still working. At an age when most people have long since retired, Yanou Collart continues to do what she's done for more than sixty years: maintain relationships, remember names, return favors, and keep secrets.

After all, as she learned in that Brussels household with the violent father and the accordion lessons, sometimes the only way to survive is to know things that other people don't want you to tell.