If you felt the Earth shake over the weekend, that was probably just the epic rumble between two Jay-Z and Robert De Niro! Two of New York’s biggest ever stars got into a beef at Leonardo DiCaprio’s Manhattan birthday bash over the weekend, and sources say it wasn’t pretty. Amazingly, it was over something as mundane and not A-listy as un-returned phone calls. Celebs: they really are just like us!

Apparently De Niro asked the rapper to record a song for the Tribeca Film Festival a few months back, but Jay never answered the phone when he called with more details. So when Hova went over to Robert’s table to say hello, the acting legend went all Raging Bull on his ass and dressed him down in a room full of famous faces (including Martin Scorsese!). “Bob wasn’t in any mood to make polite conversation,” a witness told the New York Post. “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.”

Jay then tried to laugh it off, saying he was “terrible on the phone,” which is an excuse we use probably a dozen times a week. But De Niro still wasn’t having it, so Jay-Z whipped out the big guns and brought Beyonce over to try and smooth things over. Even the slight of a glammed up Queen Bey apparently wasn’t enough to chill an angry Robert out. “De Niro kept telling him that he thinks he’s the man, but that he was disrespectful,” the source continued.  We imagine the sight of a furious De Niro to be enough to turn even a dude of Jay-Z’s stature into a whimpering Pomeranian, but the actor’s rep claims that it was no biggie. “It was a low-key private conversation between two people that was apparently overheard. It was not a heated discussion.”

[Photo: Getty Images]