La Jana (actress)

La Jana (Henriette Margarethe ('Henny') Hiebel, 24 February 1905 – 13 March 1940) was an Austro-German dancer and actress.

Henriette 'Henny' Hiebel was born in Mauer, now part of Vienna, the younger daughter of the master gilder Heinrich Hiebel, who moved his family to Frankfurt am Main when she and her sister were still young. They grew up in the old city, near the Goethe House. Henny's older sister, Anny, later trained as an opera singer. Henny trained as a dancer at the Frankfurt Opera Ballet; she first appeared on stage there at the age of 8 and later became a dancer in revues.

In his autobiography, Géza von Cziffra says that he encountered her in the Chat Noir cabaret in Paris and brought her back to Berlin, where he introduced her to Frederic Zelnik and got her into films. He describes her as he saw her then:

And there I saw her dance for the first time: that woman possessed the most attractive body that I had set eyes upon in my not all that long life. The girl, here moving to and fro in the spotlight . . . had a boyish build: slim hips, practically just the suggestion of a bust. . . . She was a simple, nice, approachable girl, but she had as much interest in sex as Immanuel Kant. That's to say, none at all.

Géza von Cziffra's version of events is disputed. There are at least two other versions of how La Jana was discovered. According to contemporary reports, she was first discovered in Frankfurt, at the Weinklause cabaret, before going to Berlin to dance. Another story is that she was brought in at a day's notice to replace the ailing star of a revue in Dresden and later received engagements in Berlin as a result.

Around 1926, La Jana, still known as Henny Hiebel, became engaged to the actor Ulrich Bettac. That year she moved with him to Berlin; however, the engagement was called off a few years later.

She appeared as a dancer in revues in Berlin, Stockholm (1933) and London (1934/35) among other cities, performing in Herman Haller's An und Aus, Erik Charell's Casanova and Max Reinhardt's Die schöne Helena. In Casanova she was presented to the audience semi-naked on a silver platter. She became the talk of Berlin. Crown Prince Wilhelm became her lover and visited her regularly at her villa in Grunewald. There were also rumours of an affair between her and Joseph Goebbels. The impresario Charles B. Cochran, in contrast, reports reading in a newspaper that "Hitler was seldom seen in public without La Jana". When Charlie Chaplin was in Berlin, they had an affair which he wrote up for the Women's Home Companion. But she is said to have been married to or at least living with the opera singer Michael Bohnen.

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