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. We have no idea if that was her intention, or why she’d have wanted to do it, but it’s curious. Our guess is 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. Strange, considering Tempo had been around longer, but possible. Or maybe she simply 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.

Though this fact doesn’t seem to be widely known—which is strange for a former Playboy model—Elsa Sørensen died last year aged seventy-nine due to complications from a bicycle accident. She was a former Miss Denmark whose September 1956 bunny mag centerfold brought her to wide notice, however the above image appeared not in Playboy, but in Adam—the U.S. version—in 1960. She graced that publication several times under the pseudonym Dane Arden, and used that for all her non-Playboy modeling assignments. In the 1960 Adam layout her photo was paired with a Robert Browning line about nothing being better than simple, unadorned beauty, and seeing her posed with neither clothes nor props, it’s clear why the editors chose that quote.