He wanted to quit his ABC television show because he did not want to talk at all on the show or read cue cards.When the couple attended parties, he would often go into a corner by himself or just disappear.He constantly blamed different foods for real and imagined symptoms, tried various extreme diets and took nutritional advice from a 90-year old guru in a Malibu commune.He complained so much that he convinced surgeons to replace both of his knees. He constantly searched the internet looking for new diseases to explain his many and varied symptoms. He suffered from anxiety, worried about everything all the time and was a chronic hypochondriac.He was eventually diagnosed with “megalophthalmus” (which means large eyes) that may be associated with cataracts and glaucoma. When he was a child, other children made fun of his very large eyeballs. He wore sunglasses most of the time to hide his eyes.From then on he rarely removed his hat in public or even in his own bedroom. He even wore it while visiting the Vatican City. He began to go bald in his early thirties and had hair transplants, in which plugs of hair were removed from the sides of his head and sutured into the bald spots. After he got the nickname “Captain” and began to wear his trademark hat, he refused to remove it, even when a hat was inappropriate.She said that the marriage lasted as long as it did only because she was trying to fix things. Throughout their relationship, they slept in separate bedrooms. She explained that when she hugged him, he would go stiff in her arms and pat her on the back. In her 2016 book, Toni Tennille: A Memoir, she described the many difficulties of their marriage, including his total inability to be affectionate, his lack of interest in sex, his “famous but overbearing father and his very, very difficult family”, his strange behavior and his inability to communicate with people. I do not have access to Dragon’s medical records so my comments on his apparent health problems are drawn from my observations of him in interviews and performances, as well as from his wife’s recollections. That same year, their record “Love Will Keep Us Together” was a national hit and they became famous. They married in 1975, left the Beach Boys and began performing in Los Angeles clubs as a duo, calling themselves Captain & Tennille. Tennille was married to Kenneth Shearer from 1962 to 1972, but was divorced by the time she met Dragon in 1973. Her father was a big band singer with Bob Crosby’s Bobcats. Tennille had attended Auburn University, where she studied piano and sang with their big band, the Auburn Knights. Their lead singer dubbed him “Captain Keyboard,” so he started to wear a nautical hat, and he had them hire Toni Tennille as a pianist and backup singer. He played keyboards for the Beach Boys, and it was there that he acquired both his nickname and his partner. At age 20, he was a member of the band Charles Wright and the Wright Sounds at age 25 he played with The Yellow Balloon and at 26 he and his brother, Dennis, formed a band called The Mission. Daryl Dragon and Toni Tennille were known as the Captain and Tennille.ĭragon started out training to be a concert pianist but decided that he preferred blues and boogie music instead of the classics. One of Daryl’s brothers died of an unexplained gunshot wound in the middle of the night, and one sister suffered from depression and committed suicide in 2012. All five of their children became musicians - a singer, pianist, flutist, harpist and music arranger.
His mother, a classical singer, was diagnosed as being bipolar and had a prefrontal lobotomy that made her unable to communicate rationally with other people, so she spent the rest of her life in bed. In later life, he developed crippling tremors that were probably Parkinson’s disease, and when he died at age 76, his publicist announced that the cause of death was kidney failure.ĭaryl Dragon’s father, Carmen Dragon, was a famous conductor, composer and arranger who worked in radio, movies and television. He seldom spoke during their performances, possibly because he suffered all his life from what I would suggest was an autism spectrum disorder, although this was not mentioned in the media. singles charts, such as “Love Will Keep Us Together”, “Do That to Me One More Time” and “Muskrat Love”, and hosted their own television show on ABC in 1976–77. They had five gold and platinum albums, had top hits on the U.S. He played keyboards and she sang to form the very popular musical duo, The Captain & Tennille, in the 1970s and 1980s. Daryl Dragon was a talented musician with serious medical problems who succeeded in the popular musical entertainment industry because of the incredible love, kindness and patience of his devoted wife, Toni Tennille.
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