How not to handle bad reviews/how to handle crazy people

Perhaps the most famous incident of his career was instigated by New York Shakespeare Festival impresario Joe Papp. In 1973, when Papp learned that Mr. [Clive] Barnes had given a poor review to David Rabe's In the Boom Boom Room -- Papp's choice to open his reign as the new director of the Lincoln Center Theater program -- Papp called the critic at home at 11:30 PM and cursed him, yelling into the phone, "You think you're going to get me? Well, I am going to get you. I am going to get you." That might have been the end of the incident, except that Papp made the call in the presence of a New York Times reporter who was writing a story about the producer.

The next day, a letter from Barnes was hand-delivered to Papp's office. "Our telephone conversation (or rather your monologue) last night disturbed me," Mr. Barnes wrote. "Not merely because I am unaccustomed to receiving obscene telephone calls, and certainly not because of your violently phrased defense of Rabe's play -- I would expect no less -- but because in your anger at our difference of opinion, you questioned my integrity. You told me that 'You are out to get me.' This is transparent nonsense. I admire you as one of the major forces in our theatre -- and I imagine you have kept the press clippings to prove it."