VEGAS MYTHS RE-BUSTED: Actor Lee Marvin Shot Vegas Vic with an Arrow

Posted on: January 19, 2024, 08:04h. 

Last updated on: January 18, 2024, 11:43h.

Corey Levitan Read More
Expertise: Commercial Gaming, Entertainment, Expert Insight, Las Vegas.

EDITOR’S NOTE: “Vegas Myths Busted” publishes new entries every Monday, with a bonus Flashback Friday edition. Today’s entry in our ongoing series originally ran on June 19, 2023. 

Longtime visitors will recall that Vegas Vic once had a voice. A recording inside the smiling neon sign greeted passersby with a piercing “Howdy Podner!” every 15 minutes around the clock.

Vegas Vic, shown in 1964,
Vegas Vic, shown in 1964, beckoned ‘podners’ into the Pioneer Club casino. (Image: Bernard Gotfryd)

This element of the Vegas attraction, installed above the Pioneer Club casino in 1951, wasn’t wildly popular with guests trying to sleep inside The Mint’s 26-story hotel tower, which opened directly across Fremont Street in May 1965.

According to a persistent Vegas myth, actor Lee Marvin was one of those guests. He was in town filming “The Professionals” on location in the nearby Valley of Fire State Park in December 1965. He allegedly worked himself into a sleep-deprived rage and shot Vic in the voice box with an arrow.

This rendered the 40-foot neon cowboy speechless for 20 years.

Lee Marvin in 'The Professionals.'
Lee Marvin in ‘The Professionals.’ (Image: Columbia Pictures)

It never happened — at least not like that.

First of all, if a mechanical sign breaks, especially a famous one that tourists come to see because it famously speaks if they wait long enough, it gets fixed. That should have been the first red flag.

Myth Understood

Arrows were shot at Vic. But Lee Marvin didn’t shoot them, and they never silenced Vic.

On Dec. 11, 1965, a drunken, late-night party raged in the 16th-floor Mint room rented for “The Professionals” actor Woody Strode and stuntman Tony Epper. The partiers included any bartender, cook, and maid who was off-duty and caught wind of it, as well as several dancers from the Wild Topless Watusi troupe performing at the casino hotel.

Woody Strode takes aim during a rehearsal for the film The Professionals"
Woody Strode takes aim during a rehearsal for the film “The Professionals” in 1965 at Valley of Fire State Park. The film’s director, Richard Brooks, looks on at right. (Image: hotelmarimari.com)

When the subject of Vegas Vic’s annoying quarter-hourly greeting came up, Strode, whose character in the movie was an expert archer, grabbed his bow and arrow and did something about it.

“It was a five-foot bow, and I had to crawl out the window to get the angle,” Strode wrote in his 1993 autobiography, “Goal Dust.” “The Mint Hotel had ledges, and I was 16 stories up standing on one. Tony reached and grabbed me by the belt at the back of my pants. I found the angle, set, let loose an arrow, and hit “Howdy Podner” right in the mouth. The whole statue started crackling. Sparks were flying everywhere. Then “Howdy Podner” blacked out and came to a stop.”

Vaughan Cannon, the YESCO sign manager responsible for maintaining and fixing Vic, later recalled the damage was limited to broken neon tubing. Since Vic’s recording only played intermittently, Strode may have been under the impression that the arrow silenced him, but this wasn’t the case.

Arrow Dynamic

Following the attack, Strode and Epper raced up several flights of stairs to Marvin’s room, where they woke him up to ask if they could stash the bow there before police arrived. Note that Marvin was sleeping, which the myth claims Vic wouldn’t allow to happen.

“Well, that crazy son of a bitch got so excited, he fired a shotgun out of his window,” according to Strode. The blast, which was aimed at the sky and not at Vic, immediately summoned police to Marvin’s room, where they found the shotgun and the bow.

Vegas Vic’s proximity to The Mint is on perfect display in this undated photo. (Image: Instagram)

Why no charges were filed was never made clear. Maybe the Las Vegas police gave Marvin a metaphorical “get out of jail free” card because he was a decorated soldier who fought and was seriously wounded during the Battle of Saipan in World War II.

Maybe one of them was among the throngs of young people inspired to go into law enforcement by his portrayal of Lt. Frank Ballinger in NBC-TV’s “M Squad” from 1957 to 1960.

It’s not beyond the realm of possibility for some autographs to have been signed in exchange for looking the other way, a resolution that neither party would have wanted publicized.

Or maybe the police just didn’t want the negative international publicity associated with hauling one of the day’s hugest and most beloved stars to jail. (Earlier that year, Marvin won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in “Cat Ballou” opposite Jane Fonda.)

It’s also possible that the police never came at all; that the responding uniformed officers merely worked for hotel security.

While this fact appears to be lost to time, another becomes clearer as more research is performed …

“Lee didn’t have anything to do with that incident at all, which both Woody and Tony confirmed to me,” Dwayne Epstein, author of the exhaustively researched 2013 biography, “Lee Marvin: Point Blank,” told journalist Jeremy Roberts in 2017.

“Lee had passed out in his hotel room hours before. Being a big star and recent Academy Award winner, he took the blame to keep his buddies from going to jail.”

The Robin Hood Party

The first mention of the arrow attack occurred in journalist Murray Hertz’s Las Vegas Review-Journal gossip column of Dec. 12, 1965. Hertz coined the incident “The Robin Hood Party,” though didn’t mention any of its participants by name. But the word soon spread that Marvin was responsible.

“Lee was so proud,” Strode wrote. “It got to be the biggest joke in town.”

Marvin wasn’t laughing in 1979, however. That’s when actress Michelle Triola, his former live-in girlfriend, used the story as evidence during a palimony suit designed to make the actor seem out of control.

There are other permutations of the Lee Marvin/Vegas Vic myth, including a rather boring one on the sign’s current Wikipedia page: “Marvin complained that Vegas Vic was too loud, so casino executives silenced Vegas Vic and it was left that way for nearly two decades,” it declares, actually citing as a reference a faux-interview with the sign that ran in the Las Vegas Sun in 2000.

But what really happened to Vegas Vic’s voice is even more boring than that, and has nothing to do with casino executives. It was explained by a Las Vegas Review-Journal story published on Jan. 25, 1968 …

City Commissioners voted to instruct the Pioneer Club to discontinue the audio portion of its famous Vegas Vic sign on downtown Fremont Street. The well-known ‘Howdy Podner’ has been keeping sleepers in nearby hotels awake … Commissioners emphasize that the sign itself will continue to operate in its familiar manner, waving at passersby, but voiceless.”

No mention of Marvin was made, though that doesn’t mean the legend wasn’t on city officials’ minds.

Legend Printed

Vic regained his voice on May 17, 1980, only to lose it for good during construction of the Fremont Street Experience canopy in 1994. That’s when the Pioneer Club became a souvenir shop and the building’s new owner decided to can the recording.

After “The Professionals,” Lee Marvin, who died of a heart attack in 1987, went on to play the title role in a much bigger western. And the final scene in 1962’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” featured a newspaper editor making a declaration that couldn’t apply more perfectly here …

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Look for “Vegas Myths Busted” every Monday on Casino.org. To read previously busted Vegas myths, visit VegasMythsBusted.com. Got a suggestion for a Vegas myth that needs busting? Email corey@casino.org.