| Hollywoodland | Oct 30 2015 |
Tempo was a pocket-sized celeb and pop culture magazine published bi-weekly out of Atlanta and New York City by Sports Report, Inc. We don’t know how long it lasted—this one is vol. 7, issue 9—but we know we’ve never seen one dated before 1953 or after 1958. When Dane Arden appeared on the cover of this one from today in 1956, she was already famous thanks to her appearance as Playboy’s centerfold just the previous month. But she had posed under her real name Elsa Sørensen, and back then that may have kept most Playboy readers from realizing Sørensen and Arden were the same person. It's curious. We have no idea if that was her intention, or why she’d have wanted to do it.
If we had to guess, we'd say that Playboy wanted an exclusive association with her Sørensen identity, and pressed her to choose a new name for future modeling. Or perhaps she thought of magazines like Tempo as lower class, and didn’t want to diminish her Playboy image. Or maybe she thought Elsa Sørensen was a little too Danish sounding for Hollywood. But there’s no evidence she ever had an interest in movies, and if she did wouldn’t she have been sacrificing much of the useful recognition she’d gained as a Playboy centerfold? All we can say is it’s one of history’s little mysteries. Hmm… that has a nice ring. Think we’ll claim that one—History’s Little Mysteries™. More Dane/Elsa below, plus Brigitte Bardot, Shirley Falls, Erroll Garner, Sabrina, the Cleveland Browns, Anita Ekberg, et al.
| Sportswire | Dec 8 2009 |
Anyway, the bit that really caught our attention was not the alleged Elvis-Carmen-Sinatra triangle, but the story about Ingo Johansson being doped. Ingemar “Ingo” Johansson was a world champion boxer who had won the heavyweight crown from Floyd Patterson a year earlier. In the March 1960 rematch, Patterson put Johansson’s lights out with a blow so vicious that Johansson was left twitching on the canvas. It was a definitive victory, just as Johansson’s earlier win over Patterson had been, but in 1960 white-black boxing matches were overtly racially divisive, and so Top Secret took advantage by suggesting that perhaps Patterson’s camp managed to slip the Swede a mickey. That question was answered in the March 1961 third match between the two, when Patterson again knocked Johansson out.After their careers were over, Johansson and Patterson became good friends and even flew to visit each other in their native countries every year. Top Secret could well have done a story on that, but of course harmony doesn’t sell magazines. So while in the U.S. civil rights strife raged through the rest of the sixties and into the seventies, two guys who once made a living beating the living shit out of each other quietly proved that, given a chance to see each other’s similarities rather than differences, people tend to get along just fine.
| Hollywoodland | May 8 2009 |
Check out this issue of the tabloid On the Q.T. from May of 1963. As always, at least one of the stars referenced on the cover is no longer widely known. In this case it’s Sabrina. She was a British model and television actress whose real name was Norma Sykes, but who became a legitimate one-name celeb based upon the anomaly of her forty-two inch bust and eighteen inch waist. Sabrina had a thing for royalty, and allowed her hourglass measurements to be thoroughly explored by such personages as the Duke of Kent, the Marquis of Milford-Haven, Prince Christian of the House of Hanover, Knight of the British Empire Sean Connery, and King Dingaling of Las Vegas Frank Sinatra. Sabrina did indeed have a specific diet she credited with helping maintain her figure, and if you absolutely can’t go to your grave without that knowledge, it’s here.
Scanning the cover again, we see Shirley Bassey has made an appearance. Bassey is a Welsh performer who sang, among other hits, the title track to the Bond film Goldfinger. What may not be immediately apparent to those unfamiliar with her is that she is black. So the photo of her with a white man speaks implicitly of interracial scandal without trumpeting it to the heavens in a headline. Perhaps that sort of restraint is why On the Q.T. called itself the class magazine in its field. Of course, on the not-so-classy side of the ledger is the banner concerning lesbians, with quotation marks around the word “pass.” Either this is to emphasize the word as slang, or to suggest that a lesbian’s quest to blend in with straight folk is fruitless. In either case, there's no doubt it implies this is a burning desire for all lesbians. How times change. These days, lesbians are considered chic and quite a few straight folk have a burning desire to associate with them—preferably after getting a good charge on the dvdcam and making sure the lighting is sufficient. We’ll have more from On the Q.T. later.
