Love didn’t keep them together – and now we know why.
Toni Tennille tells all about her life as half of the 1970s pop duo Captain & Tennille in her self-titled memoir, cowritten with her niece Caroline Tennille St. Clair, hitting shelves on April 1.
The singer spills everything on her trouble marriage with Daryl “the Captain” Dragon and her southern upbringing in a People interview released Wednesday that excerpts her page-turner.
Here’s five bombshells from her candid chat.
1. Her broken heart inspired her biggest hits.
Tennille tried striking a chord with her “emotionally distant” husband of 39 years through her yearning songs like “Do That to Me One More Time” and “The Way I Want to Touch You.” They split anyway in 2014. She says Dragon, now 73, “just didn’t know what love was.” She hoped her lyrics would open him up, but “it never happened.”
2. Her Grammy is missing – but not those stuffed muskrats.
The duo won the 1976 Best Record Grammy for their hit, “Love Will Keep us Together,” but Tennille has no idea where the award is. “I think I left it in the trunk,” she says. But she’s still got a pair of stuffed muskrats that a fan gave her in honor of their campy single “Muskrat Love.”
3. She almost lost her right index finger.
Tennille’s finger was almost amputated after being run over by a wheelbarrow when she was 5 and and growing up in Montgomery, Ala. She’s been self conscious about the reconstructed digit ever since. “When I was offered movie roles I said, ‘What if they have to see my hands?'” she admits. If they did, “I wouldn’t do it.”
4. Dragon wears sunglasses to shield his oversized eyeballs.
Dragon didn’t just wear shades to look groovy. Tennille reveals he actually suffered from megalophthalmos, which causes oversized eyes. The other children would “would make fun of him and call him ‘Martian,'” she says. She also spills that he wore his hat in bed because a failed hair transplant left him self-conscious.
5. She and Dragon gave the grapefruit diet a go.
The three-week grapefruit diet was such a fad in the 1970s that Dragon insisted the couple give it a try. He was “terrified” of eating the “wrong” foods and believed the extreme diet of only white grapefruit would “fix” him. “I was still holding my tongue about Daryl’s crazy ideas,” she shares in her memoir, “so I did exactly as he proposed.”
