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Robert De Niro Goes Off On Jay Z

Robert De Niro and Jay-Z got into a tense beef at Leonardo DiCaprio’s birthday bash the other night, when De Niro called the rapper disrespectful, Page Six can exclusively reveal.
Spies say “Godfather II” and “Taxi Driver” star De Niro gave Jay a dressing-down in a roomful of celebs including Martin Scorsese because the rap mogul had refused to return De Niro’s calls.
Sources add that Jay tried to joke his way out of the situation, and even his wife, Beyoncé, tried to intervene, but De Niro wouldn’t back down.
“Bob was sitting at a table, and when Jay-Z went over to say hello, De Niro told Jay that he never called him back,” a source says.

A spy then overheard De Niro complaining to the rapper, a fellow TriBeCa resident, about a song Jay-Z agreed to record for the Tribeca Film Festival. De Niro had reached out to discuss further details, but Jay never returned his calls.
“Bob wasn’t in any mood to make polite conversation,” the spy says. “He told Jay that if somebody calls you six times, you call them back. It doesn’t matter who you are, that is just rude.”
When Jay-Z tried to make a joke of it, saying he is terrible on the phone, a source says, “De Niro kept telling him that he thinks he’s the man, but that he was disrespectful.’ ”
“Beyoncé came over, but that didn’t calm Bob down,” the source said, adding that afterward, “It was the talk of the party. Everyone was saying there’s only one star in New York bigger and badder than Jay-Z, and that’s Robert De Niro. He can be quite scary when he’s angry.”
But a source close to De Niro told us, “It was a low-key private conversation between two people that was apparently overheard. It was not a heated discussion.”

The Darby bash, which sources say ended at 5 a.m. with a tab of nearly $3 million, much of which went to the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, drew Cameron Diaz, Jamie Foxx, Chris Rock, Jonah Hill, Edward Norton, Mark Ruffalo and Emma Watson.

Reps for both De Niro and Jay-Z declined to comment.

Media Decoder Blog: Robert Thomson to Be Chief of News Corporation's New Publishing Company

Mark Lennihan/Associated Press Robert Thomson

2:53 p.m. | Updated

Robert Thomson, the top editor at The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones and a confidante of News Corporation’s chairman and chief executive, Rupert Murdoch, is expected to be named chief executive of the media conglomerate’s newly spun-off publishing company.

Mr. Thomson will run the separate, publicly traded company, which will include The Journal, The New York Post, HarperCollins and a suite of lucrative television assets in Australia. The announcement is expected as early as Monday, according to a person briefed on the company’s decision-making.

Mr. Thomson took over at The Journal in 2008, soon after News Corporation completed its $5.6 billion acquisition of Dow Jones. He serves as managing editor of The Journal and editor in chief of Dow Jones, which also publishes Barron’s and the Dow Jones Newswires.

Gerard Baker, a deputy managing editor at the Journal, will take over for Mr. Thomson at The Journal, said the person briefed on the decisions, who could not discuss private conversations publicly.

At The Journal, Mr. Baker has overseen Washington and political coverage, among other topics. He previously wrote a neoconservative column for The Times of London, also owned by News Corporation, and served as Washington bureau chief at The Financial Times, where Mr. Thomson was the top editor of the United States edition.

Mr. Thomson began his career at News Corporation in 1979 as a reporter at The Herald in Melbourne, Australia. He and Mr. Murdoch are both Australian, and have taken family vacations together. Mr. Murdoch is often seen in Mr. Thomson’s office in the Journal newsroom.

In his tenure at The Journal, Mr. Thomson increased circulation by broadening the newspaper’s focus beyond business to include more general-interest and lifestyle news. He oversaw an expansion of the newsroom budget, added photographs to go along with the paper’s signature dot drawings and introduced a local New York section.

Mr. Murdoch will serve as chairman of the publishing company and remain chief executive of the entertainment company, which will include News Corporation’s movie studio, Fox Broadcasting and cable channels like FX and Fox News.

News Corporation plans to complete its split, which was announced in June, in mid-2013. Additional announcements about the publishing company’s board and cash structure are expected before the end of the year.

A News Corporation spokeswoman declined to comment. Reuters was the first to report on the expected appointments.

Robert J. Manning, Former Editor of The Atlantic, Dies at 92

Robert J. Manning, who covered the White House as a cub reporter during the final term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, worked for the State Department under President John F. Kennedy and later became editor of The Atlantic Monthly, where he broadened the magazine’s scope and readership, died on Friday in Boston. He was 92.

The cause was lymphoma, his son Brian said.

Mr. Manning became editor in chief of The Atlantic Monthly in 1966, more than a century after the magazine was founded in Boston. (It is now called The Atlantic.) While the magazine had a rich history in cultural matters, Mr. Manning expanded its attention to current affairs, including the civil rights movement, Vietnam and the oil and economic crises of the 1970s.

“He really began the process of bringing it into the modern era,” said James Fallows, a national correspondent for the magazine who was one of many writers, including Elizabeth Drew, Ward Just and Tracy Kidder, Mr. Manning nurtured there.

Mr. Manning got an early jump on his journalism career. He was a senior in high school in Binghamton, N.Y., when he was hired as a copy boy at The Binghamton Press. Soon he was promoted to reporter. He never bothered with college, instead taking a job with The Associated Press in Buffalo before joining the Army in 1942. He received an early honorable discharge because of nearsightedness.

“He couldn’t get his gas mask on because of his glasses,” Brian Manning said.

In April 1945, Mr. Manning was working for United Press in Washington when White House officials summoned reporters to announce Roosevelt’s death in Warm Springs, Ga. By 1949, he had become a writer for Time magazine. In 1954 he wrote a cover story on Ernest Hemingway after interviewing and fishing with him in Cuba. He spent his final years with Time, from 1958 to 1960, as its London bureau chief.

In 1961, the secretary of state, Dean Rusk, hired Mr. Manning to be assistant secretary of state for public affairs in the Kennedy administration. As part of an administration that was often accused of limiting press access to information, particularly during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Mr. Manning was said to be less restrictive than other officials. In June 1963, he traveled with the president to Italy, Ireland, Britain and Germany, where Kennedy gave his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in West Berlin.

Mr. Manning joined The Atlantic Monthly in 1964 as executive editor under Edward Weeks, the editor, and succeeded him on his retirement two years later, a tumultuous time of war in Vietnam and political and cultural conflicts at home. He was proud to learn later that he had been placed on President Richard M. Nixon’s enemies list.

“If you look back at the Atlantic’s coverage in those days,” Mr. Fallows said, “I think it gives you a very good sense of America and how it was changing.”

Mr. Manning’s time at The Atlantic ended in a bitter dispute with Mortimer B. Zuckerman, a real estate developer who bought the magazine in 1980. In a fight played out in court for several years, Mr. Zuckerman maintained that he had been misled about the magazine’s troubled finances when he bought it, and Mr. Manning and others accused Mr. Zuckerman of reneging on the terms of the deal, including an expectation that Mr. Manning would remain at the magazine.

Mr. Manning was gone by the end of 1980. The case ended in 1987 with Mr. Zuckerman ordered to honor the original deal. In a separate settlement, he agreed to pay Mr. Manning $429,000. Mr. Zuckerman, who now owns The Daily News in New York, sold the magazine in 1999.

Mr. Manning later became editor in chief of Boston Publishing and oversaw publication of “The Vietnam Experience,” an illustrated 25-volume series. In 1992 he published a memoir, “The Swamp Root Chronicle.”

Robert Joseph Manning was born on Dec. 25, 1919, in Binghamton. His first wife, the former Margaret Raymond, a former book editor of The Boston Globe, died in 1984. In 1987 he married the former Theresa Slomkowski. She survives him. Besides his son Brian, he is survived by another son, Robert, and five grandchildren. A third son, Richard, died in 2004.