The Gene Krupa Story The audience rewards Krupa with a standing ovation. The film ends as Ethel tries to sneak off, sure Gene will return to his old ways. He catches up with her, and asks where she is going, "without me"? The closing credits come down on a shot of them walking away together, into the night. In real life, the two were first married from 1934 to 1942; they remarried in 1946 and were together until Ethel's death in 1955. Krupa himself played the drums on the soundtrack for the film, and for the sequences in which Mineo, as Gene, plays the
Gene Krupa to changing fashion, but he never adjusted to the bebop style of jazz. In 1954, Krupa returned to Hollywood to appear in the films "The Glenn Miller Story" and "The Benny Goodman Story". In 1959, the movie biography "The Gene Krupa Story" was released; Sal Mineo portrayed Krupa, and the film included a cameo by Red Nichols. During the 1950s, Krupa often played at the Metropole near Times Square in Manhattan. He continued to perform in famous clubs in the 1960s, including the Showboat Lounge in northwest Washington, D.C. Increasingly troubled by back pain, he retired in the late 1960s