Benno Herz, the program director at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles, drew my attention to a curious error that has routinely surfaced in stories about the so-called Scarface Mansion — the sprawling Montecito villa that Bertram Goodhue designed in 1906 for the real-estate tycoon James Waldron Gillespie, and that Brian De Palma later used as a location for his gangster epic starring Al Pacino. Such publications as Forbes, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Post have claimed that this nine-acre estate once belonged to Thomas Mann. One account alleges that Mann "entertained Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill there." This is all absurd. Mann did well by his royalties, but he could never have afforded a property on the scale of El Fureidis. He owned only one house in America — the one at 1550 San Remo Drive, designed by J.R. Davidson at his behest. He had earlier occupied houses in Princeton, Brentwood, and Pacific Palisades. He never lived in Santa Barbara, though he did visit Lotte Lehmann there. I do not believe he ever met Churchill, much less entertained him. I have no idea how all this started, but, as Benno points out, it could lead to some entertaining deepfakes.
