ME: STORIES OF MY LIFE; by Katharine Hepburn; Knopf; 418 pages; $25.
Recalling early acting years in her charming memoir, "Me," Katharine Hepburn confesses "a wild desire to be absolutely fascinating."She certainly succeeded, through more than 40 films and a record-breaking four best actress Oscars. Now 84, she proves the fascination still holds in her breezy autobiography.
Less a tell-all than a tell-some from a woman renowned for protecting her privacy, "Me" delivers what the author promises: a non-linear series of "flashes" from her life.
And what a life.
Hepburn grew up with a heady mix of material comfort (her father a doctor, her mother a Corning glass heiress) and intellectual ferment.
Mrs. Hepburn shocked their Hartford, Conn., neighbors with her suffragist rallies (the author recalls herself at age 8, forcing pro-vote balloons on unsuspecting fairgoers). And Dr. Hepburn's town meeting on venereal disease and prostitution didn't exactly go unnoticed.
No wonder young Kath turned out headstrong, plunging into acting even though her father thought it "a silly profession closely allied to streetwalking."
Landing her first jobs through a mix of persistence and timing, Hepburn made a splash onstage in "The Big Pond" and caught the eye of film director George Cukor, with whom she was to make some of her most popular movies.
She also caught the eye, romantically, of Howard Hughes (who landed his plane on a golf course to meet her), her agent Leland Hayward and, finally, the married, older, tormented Spencer Tracy.
Hepburn's reminiscences range widely between the domestic and the professional. And her digressions demand occasional patience.
She tells more than we care to know about the kitchen in her family's summer home. Or fixing a stranger's flat tire. Or a rocky trip through Italy with "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" screenwriter Willie Rose.
But she compensates with more memorable scenes and unexpectedly intimate revelations (the who, where and when surrounding her loss of virginity, for instance).
And she's capable of ruthless dissections of her aging body, early selfish behavior ("I am horrified at what an absolute pig I was") and the limits of her talent ("Dorothy Parker was right," she writes in response to the Algonquin wit's skewer of her in the Broadway flop, "The Lake").
She's easier-going on others in the biz, and "Me" may disappoint readers expecting Hepburn to dish other actors and directors. Accustomed to spending most of her free time with her large family, Hepburn writes, "I never got very close to anyone in the theater or movies."
Still, she offers brief, lively anecdotes about some of her favorite films and pens loving essays on director Cukor, MGM head L.B. Mayer, John Wayne and of course Tracy.
Though she's a shrewd interpreter of his screen appeal, her 27-year relationship with Tracy remains partly opaque, apparently even to herself. She writes, "I have no idea how Spence felt about me." But she finishes the book with an appropriately sentimental flourish - a tribute to the actor in the form of an open letter.
As she proved in "The Making of `The African Queen,' " Hepburn has a vivid style and a good ear for dialogue. "Me" reads chatty, full of dashes and rhetorical asides ("Do you know what I mean?"). She even drops in a recipe for currant cake, which she discovered while shooting "The Corn Is Green" in Wales. The book's speedy tempo finds a visual complement in photos scattered generously through the book.