“Now we come to ME,” Katharine Hepburn writes cheekily in her 1991 autobiography of the same name.

She knows what her audience wants, and the self-confessed egotist is happy to oblige. The four-time Oscar-winning actress, star of countless classics, including Bringing Up Baby, Pat and Mike, and The Lion in Winter, survived for decades by doing it her own way, and became an American institution in the process. “I have become a familiar,” she writes. “I am very aware of that now. I’m like the Statue of Liberty to a lot of people.”

In Me: Stories of My Life, the Hepburn persona is on full display—conversational, witty, stubborn, weird, scattered, competitive, biting, unique, and surprisingly warm. The reader feels charmed yet snowed under as Hepburn recounts her numerous athletic exploits, her romances, her crush on John Wayne, laughing from morning to night with Cary Grant, a minute description of her best friend George Cukor’s house, and even the recipe for her favorite currant cake.

But through it all Hepburn, a fan of cold baths and swimming in the icy sea, is a realist who counts her blessings, aware she has led a charmed life. “I am happy,” she writes. “I have a happy nature—I like the rain—I like the sun—the heat—the cold—the mountains, the sea—the flowers, the—Well, I like life and I’ve been so lucky. Why shouldn’t I be happy? I don’t lock doors. I don’t hold grudges. Really the only thing I’m not mad about is wind. I find it disturbing.”

To the Manor Born

Katharine Houghton Hepburn was born in 1907, in Hartford, Connecticut. Unlike most of her contemporaries, she was from money—patrician, blue blood Northeastern aristocracy—of which she was clearly inordinately proud.

But Hepburn was most proud of her radically liberal, intellectual parents, and it is when she writes about them that her real humanity shines through the patter. Her father, Dr. Thomas Hepburn, founded the New England Social Hygiene Association, which educated the public about the then-taboo issue of venereal disease. But the true superstar of the family was her mother, Katharine, who fought for birth control access and was the head of the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association.

The fearless Hepburn and her five rambunctious siblings grew up campaigning for the vote with her mother, passing out pro-suffrage balloons at the county fair. Hepburn paints her childhood as one filled with intellectual stimulation, competitive sports, and freedom rare for a rich girl in Edwardian America.

“There was a hemlock tree on the west side of the property,” she recalls. “That was the tree I used to climb. The neighbors used to call Mother. ‘Kit! Kathy is in the top of the hemlock!’ ‘Yes, I know. Don’t scare her. She doesn’t know that it’s dangerous.’”

Decades later, Hepburn’s love for her remarkable parents can still bring the reader to tears. “How I miss you two,” she writes. “I was so used to turning to you. It was heaven. Always to have you two to turn to in despair, in joy. There you were: strong—funny. Two rocks. What you did for me—wow! What luck to be born out of love and to live in an atmosphere of warmth and interest.”

Tom

But there was a dark side to this picture-perfect portrayal. According to William J. Mann, author of the gossipy and at times mean-spirited Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn, Dr. Thomas Hepburn was an exacting father with an explosive temper, whose wife placated him at every turn.

While Hepburn herself is honest that her family’s activism made them outcasts in proper society, she is mum about how her parents’ emphasis on principled perfectionism may have negatively affected her and her siblings. There was certainly trouble brewing in her older brother Tom, a sensitive, athletic boy who was the 14-year-old Hepburn’s constant companion.

In April 1921, the two siblings were on an adventure in New York City, staying with a family friend. One night, they went to see A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court on Broadway. “As I later told the story,” Hepburn writes, “I said that Tom had looked at me and said, ’You’re my girl, aren’t you? You’re my favorite girl in the whole world.’ Why did I say this? Was it true? I mean, did Tom really say it? I don’t know any longer.”

In muddled, removed prose, Hepburn describes the “facts” as she recalls them. “Next morning, I went upstairs to wake him up. There he was—next to the bed—his knees bent—hanged by a torn piece of sheeting. It was tied to a rafter. He was dead. Strangled. It made no sense. In a state of numb shock, I cut him down and laid him on the bed.”

The Hepburn family’s response to Tom’s apparant suicide is shocking to modern sensibilities. Her father wrote to the papers, claiming his son had simply been doing a rope trick. The family rarely if ever spoke of him again.

Seventy years later, Hepburn remained non-committal and unwilling to criticize her family’s response or even admit that Tom died by suicide. But she is honest about the effect Tom’s death had on her. “This incident seemed to sort of separate me from the world as I’d known it,” she writes. “I tried school but…I felt isolated. I knew something that the girls did not know: tragedy.”

Katharine of Arrogance

After graduating from Bryn Mawr, Hepburn knew what she wanted—to be a sensation. “It was all or nothing for me me me,” she recalls. “I was just full of the joy of life and opportunity and a wild desire to be absolutely fascinating.”

This blind ambition was tempered with a surprisingly naïve, sheltered view of life. Her description of losing her virginity to her perfectly named husband, Ludlow Ogden Smith, is hilarious for its reticence and coy honesty:

I guess that I knew that Luddy was in love with me. But you see my hitch was that I was in love with myself ...I wanted to be a big star…Anyway, Luddy and I were alone in the apartment and there was the bed and there didn’t seem to be any reason not to. Well — what I’m trying to say is that — that’s what happened. I mean — we did it… And that was the end of my virtue.

With refreshing candor and self-deprecating humor, Hepburn recounts what an “absolute pig” she was to sweet, loyal Luddy, who she married in 1928 (they divorced in 1942). And some of the funniest bits in the autobiography detail how her hard-hitting confidence got her fired from numerous stage productions.

When she arrived in Hollywood in 1932 to star in her first movie, A Bill of Divorcement, an admittedly haughty Hepburn stepped off the train in a ridiculously expensive high-necked ruffled riding coat, a bizarre hat perched on her head, and one eye swollen shut in 90-degree heat.

According to Hepburn, the studio executives there to meet her were dismayed, exclaiming their new find looked like a cadaver. Things didn’t get better until her equally “odd,” but “generous” co-star John Barrymore took the unconventional, headstrong novice under his wing after an unsuccessful attempt at seduction:

He asked me to come to his dressing room on the lot one day. I went. Knocked on the door. He said, “Come in.” I did. And there he was, lying on his couch in—what shall I say?—comparative disarray. I must have looked totally blank. There was a pause. A quick shuffle of blankets. “Oh. I am sorry. See you later.” I went. Oh my, how very strange. Anyway, he was an angel after that one feeble whatever you want to call it. His main object after that seemed to be to be certain that I made a big hit.

Box Office Poison

Hepburn’s star quickly rose, though the Hollywood community was at a loss to understand her. As Hepburn notes, she was a homebody who wore threadbare men’s clothing, dared to live with close female companions (leading to rumors she was a lesbian), and had a deep attachment to her family (her father managed her money, sending her an allowance into her 50s).

Now a movie star, Hepburn started a three-year relationship with the equally quirky Howard Hughes, who she treats with generous sympathy in her book. The two had much in common, including a self-proclaimed “wild desire to be famous.” Hughes taught the adventurous Hepburn to fly and displayed an impulsiveness she shared. “When we used a seaplane, sometimes if it was hot we would stop in the middle of Long Island Sound and anchor the plane, take off our clothes, dive off a wing naked to cool off,” she recalls. “It was fun.”

But her career crashed in 1938, when the Independent Theater Owners of America declared that independent, self-sufficient female stars, including Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, and Marlene Dietrich, were “Box Office Poison.” According to Anne Edward’s insightful, engrossing Katharine Hepburn: A Remarkable Woman, the list’s publication led to a good-natured fight between Hepburn and Dietrich, on a trip back East in Cole Porter’s train car, over who was the “biggest” box office poison.

However, Hepburn wasn’t down for the count for long. She credits Hughes with encouraging her to buy the film rights to the play The Philadelphia Story. The stage production and 1940 movie were smash hits, and Hepburn was back on top—on her own terms.

Spence

“Now I’m going to tell you about Spencer. You may think you’ve waited a long time. But let’s face it, so did I. I was thirty-three,” Hepburn writes, after theatrically saving the story of their legendary love story till the end of the book. “I discovered what ‘I love you’ really means. It means I put you and your interests and your comfort ahead of my own interests and my own comfort because I love you…LOVE has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get—only with what you are expecting to give—which is everything.”

By her own account, Hepburn gave everything to her 27-year clandestine relationship with the married Spencer Tracy, who she had long admired from afar. According to Hepburn, Tracy initially balked at appearing in 1942’s Woman of the Year, exclaiming, “How can I do a picture with a woman who has dirt under her fingernails and who is of ambiguous sexuality and always wears pants.”

Hepburn’s tender, vulnerable, aching side comes out as she gushes over Tracy—his genius, his humor, his intellect. She is also honest about his private torments, his battle with alcoholism and depression, and her choice to put her own career aside to soothe and nurse a man who could never rest, lying on the floor beside him, talking him to sleep as he battled insomnia.

While Hepburn presents their unequal relationship as solely her choice, it appears to be a classic AL-Anon relationship, with the practical, strident partner being used by a mentally ill partner. As Edwards notes, Tracy could be remarkably cruel to Hepburn, “squashing” her down in front of friends and co-workers. Mann believes Tracy was in fact gay or bisexual, and that Hepburn exaggerated the extent of their romance.

Whatever the truth, Hepburn’s depth of feeling for Tracy is clear. It was she who found him dead in 1967, and her sorrow is palpable. “He looked so happy to be done with living, which for all his accomplishments had been a frightful burden to him,” she writes. “I never knew him, I think. And he is the only one who ever knew me—who was onto me. I think I was a comfort to him. I hope. Dear Friend.”

As Edward writes, after Tracy’s death Hepburn proudly came out of the shadows, recounting their secret love story to one and all. It may have been payback against Tracy’s sainted widow, Louise, whose careless comment to her, “I thought you were only a rumor,” admittedly cut her to the core:

After nearly thirty years? A rumor? What could be the answer to that? It was a deep and fundamental wound—deeply set—never to be budged. Almost thirty years Spence and I had known each other—through good and bad times. Some rumor.

The Fighter

“As one goes through life one learns that if you don’t paddle your own canoe, you don’t move,” Hepburn writes.

Hepburn retained her fighting spirit till the end, though she clearly softens the edges. According to Edwards, after feeling mistreated by director Joe Mankiewicz in 1959’s Suddenly Last Summer, she proved she was not one to mess with. “When Mankiewicz had called the final ‘cut’ on the film, Kate strode across the sound stage to him,” Edwards writes. “’Are you absolutely sure you won’t need my services anymore?’ she asked. ‘Yes, I am sure.’ ‘Absolutely?’ ‘Absolutely.’ Then, in front of the shocked company, she leaned forward and spat straight into his eye.”

On the set of 1981’s On Golden Pond, the 74-year-old Hepburn recalled taunting the equally strong Jane Fonda (whom she adored). “One moment in the picture Jane had to do a back somersault into the water off a springboard. I would torture her by saying, ‘If you can’t do it, dear, I’ll do it for you,’” she writes. “‘It’s one of my specialties.’ You may be sure that she did it herself.”

She continued to work for progressive causes, campaigning for Planned Parenthood in the 1980s in honor of her extraordinary mother. She died in her family home in Fenwick, Connecticut, in 2003, surrounded by her beloved family. “You suddenly realize what a tremendous opportunity it is just to be alive,” she wrote of surviving into old age. “The potential. If you can keep a-goin’—you actually can do it. So just keep a-goin’—you can win. It’s when you stop that you’re done.”