"American Beauty" Oscar winner Kevin Spacey says he's never been to the beautiful summer enclave of New York's Fire Island. So there.

In a letter to the editor in this week's issue of New York magazine, Spacey rebuts a report in the publication's Sept. 9 edition that said he had rented a palatial bayside house in the island's Pines community, complete with a private boat, "for the last two weeks of August through the end of September."

"The house has at least four en suite bedrooms, a couple of flat-screen plasma TVs, and a gym, and comes complete with a butler and gardener," said the item, headlined "Spacey out in Fire Island" and which Spacey, 43, terms a "total inaccuracy."

Spacey writes that he'd never been to Fire Island and, as it is, he says, he couldn't possibly have visited the community because he spent the summer at an amusement park in Boise, Idaho.

He then takes up a more didactic tone. "While I understand that most of your reporting is done in good fun and that this particular story does not appear to have been written with malicious intent," Spacey writes, "it is so completely untrue that it seems to warrant a reexamination by New York of the freedom it gives to reporters who write anything they want without concern for the facts."

Fire Island, which consists of several communities -- some swinging single, some family-oriented, some gay, some straight (the Pines is predominantly gay) -- is located off the southern coast of Long Island.