Instead of wondering why the Captain and Tennille broke up – the marriage, not just the singing duo – Toni Tennille’s new book prompts the question, why did they stay together so long?
Tennille wrote A Memoir with her niece, Caroline, and she dishes about her nearly 40-year-marraige to Daryl Dragon aka The Captain. She calls him “emotionally distant and claims she wrote some of their biggest hits in hopes of getting him to come out of his shell but it didn’t work.
Ever wonder why The Captain always wore sunglasses? If you google pictures of the pair, you’ll find one or two where he’s without glasses and his eyes are, well, huge. He has a condition called megalophthalmos that makes him self-conscious so he covers up his large eyes with glasses. (They’re actually beautiful eyes, but definitely not like everyone else’s.)
At the time of the divorce filing, Dragon told reporters he was blindsided and didn’t know why she had filed. Toni said it was music that kept them together, not love, after all. They haven’t made much music since The Captain began suffering from a Parkinsons-like disease in 2010 that prevented him from playing the keyboards.
The Captain and Tennille’s 1970’s songs are the epitome of cheesey music now, but they actually won a Grammy award for Love Will Keep Us Together in 1976 but Toni lost the golden gramaphone somewhere along the way. What she still has are two stuffed muskrats given to her by a fan in honour of their hit, Muskrat Love. If I were her, I’d start looking a little harder for that Grammy and let Goodwill have the taxidermy trophies.
Toni Tennille: A Memoir, comes out April first.