First Person Singular

By AMELIA WEISS

ME: STORIES OF MY LIFE by Katharine Hepburn; Knopf; 420 pages; $25

Katharine Hepburn is an odd bird. Hemorrhaging after an eye operation, she yells to her chauffeur, "David, take off your shoes and socks and your pants -- and get into the tub and try to get the blood out of the stuff I throw in there." With her lover Howard Hughes, two of the skinniest eccentrics of our time, she dives naked off the wing of his seaplane. In a chapter about another beau, the agent Leland Hayward, Hepburn talks about living in Los Angeles' Coldwater Canyon, living in Benedict Canyon, finding a snake in her living room, buying real estate and embarrassing a young doctor at lunch. And that's the story of Leland Hayward. There is also a recipe for currant cake, and four pages devoted to changing a tire on I-95. If there's someone who has written eloquently about Katharine Hepburn, it isn't Katharine Hepburn.

But it's pointless to knock Me. Critics have shot more arrows at Hepburn than you might find piercing the sides of St. Sebastian. Her voice was usually described in terms reserved for plumbing; her breasts were too small, her neck too scrawny; she wasn't sexy enough to play Scarlett O'Hara; she was labeled "box-office poison." And the toughest critic, Hepburn herself, says, "I was a terrible pig."

There is no sensationalism here. Hepburn may not be her own Boswell, but neither is she Kitty Kelley. "There's the bedroom," a guide to Hepburn's life might say. "And there's the bed, and there's the chest of drawers, and there's the vanity. They had a great old time here, and it was fun. Ladies and gentlemen, this way, please."

She first shared that bedroom with Luddy -- Ludlow Ogden Smith -- her only husband. Though they separated almost immediately, he remained a part of her family, and she chastises herself for having abused him. "Listen to this," says Hepburn. "I made him change his name . . . to S. Ogden Ludlow. I didn't want to be called Mrs. Smith. I thought it was melancholic." Her true love, of course, was Spencer Tracy. "He didn't like this or that. I changed this and that . . . Food -- we ate what he liked. We did what he liked. We lived a life which he liked. This gave me great pleasure." With the same warmth that marks her film acting, she plays a final love scene that is more intimate than any revelation of sexual secrets. As if this were their last movie together, she re-enacts the night of his death.

But most of the romantic stuff is pretty dull. Much livelier -- and full of slapstick -- are chapters devoted to disaster: the hurricane that demolished her home; the auto accident that fractured her ankle. And there is one hysterical vision of a day spent weeding with David Lean. "It's absolutely no use," says Lean, "unless you get the root."

Me reflects its author's personality perfectly; it even replicates the tremor in her voice with dashes and sentence fragments. An odd bird Hepburn be, but then so is Rose Sayer pouring gin over the side of the African Queen. And Jo March sliding down a banister. And Susan Vance singing to a leopard. And incredible Tracy Lord -- lighted from above, in a George Cukor close-up, dressed by Adrian, and kissed by Jimmy Stewart in the moonlight. For lovers of film, it's very hard for the artist who made these women to lay an egg.