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 witness, John Pateakos had been paid to testify falsely against Krupa. Pateakos returned to prove that he wasn't a minor, that he had dodged the draft, and that he had been instructed by federal agents to leave after the first conviction. He recanted his earlier testimony. In the early 1970s Krupa's house in Yonkers, New York, was damaged by fire. He continued to live in the parts of the house that were habitable. In 1973, Krupa died in Yonkers at the age 64 from heart failure, though he also had leukemia and emphysema. He was buried in Holy Cross Cemetery