YOU’VE GOT A FRIEND IN YANOU

“When you get to Paris, call Yanou.” That’s what Americans who like to eat have been telling their friends for the last 20 years. “Yanou knows everything.”

And everybody. For Yanou Collart collects friends the way some women collect jewelry: passionately, discriminately and with an eye to value. If you’ve ever read a book by Colette, you will instantly recognize this woman. She lives in a world much like the one that Gigi was meant to inherit, and she has figured out how to parlay centuries of French common sense and joie de vivre into a pretty nifty living. Yanou is rather like the last of the great French courtesans, but her currency is food and friendship instead of sex. “For me,” she says, “friendship is life. You are in love with a man and it’s great, but it might disappear overnight. Friendship lasts forever.”

And Yanou has an awful lot of friends. Just last week, she threw a big party for some of them at the home of her friends Margo and Irwin Winkler. Le tout Hollywood showed up. Look over there--it’s Barbra Streisand, and isn’t that Bette Midler? Why there’s Peter Falk, Jackie Bisset and Alexander Godunov sitting with Yanou at another table. Danny Kaye’s here, too, and later his wife, Sylvia, will sit down at the piano with Dudley Moore. But right now they are busy eating food prepared by the hottest chefs in France. They’re all friends of Yanou, too.

Yanou has made her world into an elegant global village. Colette’s characters lived out their lives in the limited world of the Paris demi-monde , but Yanou makes connections for people who fly back and forth across the Atlantic at a drop of a hat. If her ami Norman Mailer (or Tom Wolfe or William Styron, to name a couple) wants to take a peek at Versailles, Yanou simply calls up her friend the Duc d’Orleans (“his family lived there, you know”) and arranges a private visit. Does somebody want to see the private Picassos? Yanou gives her pal Paloma a ring.

But food is really her forte. “I only like people who have respect for food,” she says. “When you are around a table, you can see what people are really like. If a person tries to give an image which is not real, during a lunch or a dinner there is a point when it breaks down. You can tell by watching what they do with a napkin, how they talk to the waiter, the way they use the salt.”

Given this attitude, it is not surprising that when the great chefs of France decided to cook a meal together back in 1972, Yanou Collart was in charge of public relations. “Troisgros, Bocuse, Verge, Guerard, Laserre, Olivet, Outhier, Barrier and Laporte all decided to do a dinner together,” she says, “and I helped them put it on.” They called themselves L’Association de la Grande Cuisine Francaise, and the dinner was, by Yanou’s own admission, the “greatest disaster of the century.” The chefs had never worked together before, and they didn’t quite know how to. But it was the start of the new French-chef movement, and Yanou was not deterred. She began promoting French chefs in America. Her chefs became her cause, and when her American friends came to Paris, she made them go to the restaurants of the hour.

Danny Kaye says that when he went to France in 1973, she refused to let him go to the restaurant he had chosen. “That’s over,” she said, “finished.” She took Kaye around to see her chef friends (Bocuse was not yet a household word), liked the way he ate, and a couple of years later arrived in Los Angeles with Bocuse, Guerard and Troisgros in tow so that Kaye could cook for them.

“If I would be very rich, I would still spend my life doing what I am doing,” she says, “putting people together.” But Yanou is not very rich, and so last week she threw that party at the Winklers to announce that she was making “friendship” her business. Yanou spends all that time getting to know you, and now she wants to turn it into a paying proposition.

Naturally, the occasion was stylish. She brought with her four very hot young chefs from all corners of France to cook the dinner. They were Jean Bardet, a remarkable man whom Gault Millau named “the chef of the year,” Jean-Pierre Vigato of Apicius in Paris, Philippe Rostang from Antibes and Antoine Bouterin, who now cooks in New York at Le Perigord East.

The dinner was not memorable, but the business may well be. It’s called Yanou’s Choice, and membership costs $2,000. Already, says Yanou, Johnny Carson, Kathleen Turner, Sydney Pollack and Carl Sondheimer have joined up. (Membership will be limited to 150 people, and members have to

be friends, friends of friends or at least someone with whom Yanou has shared a meal.) What they will get are concrete proofs of Yanou’s friendship--and a guarantee of a good time every time they land in Europe. Can’t get into the restaurant of your choice? If you’re rich enough, your worries are over; Yanou will see that you do.

Can she do it? Probably. Her track record is remarkable. It was only last week, after all, that she managed to get Paul Bocuse to New York to honor Pierre Franey at a dinner featuring California cuisine (see the report by Lois Dwan on Page 101). “It was nothing,” says Yanou airily. “Everybody involved was my friend.”

And in a world where food has become a hot commodity, Yanou certainly has friends in the right places.