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

Katharine Hepburn.

An actress. A living legend. A star.

But that’s not how she sees it.

Lucky. Long in the tooth. Stupid. An absolute, terrible pig. Those are just a few of the things she considers herself to be.

“Me” is a candid conversation with Katharine Hepburn. Converse she does, in a book — punctuated with delightful photographs — that runs the gamut of her life from her parents to Spencer Tracy to “this — that — no no the other thing.” Hepburn gives fair warning that this book is a string of flashes. It does jump around at times with an “Oh, I meant to tell you. I was standing on my head the other day …” in the middle of a narrative. But that is what makes it a witty and, at times, painfully honest account of her experiences of “this thing called `living.”‘

Family and home are important links in Hepburn’s life. Most of her stories have a way of meandering back to them, even during her Hollywood career. Her devotion to her parents and siblings is evident through the loving descriptions. Her youth was influenced by her parents open-mindedness; they were a united force in trying to inform society in the early 1900s about prostitution, venereal disease, teen-age pregnancy and white-slave traffic.

One of the more emotional stories about her family is her description of a 14-year-old Kate finding Tom, the older brother she revered, dead. The terri- fying moments she spent not knowing what to do and why it happened are over- whelming.

Then there is the multitude of stories about her career from theater to films to singing. This is where the Hepburn we know tells us what we don’t know. She tells of her first trip to Hollywood (what a train ride), her first movie (“A Bill of Divorcement” with John Barrymore) and her first Oscar (from “Morning Glory” with Douglas Fairbanks Jr.). Hepburn leads us through the scenes of her movie life, describing famous and not-so-famous people and what she thought of them. Her best descriptions of her fellow workers are not of her co-stars — most of whom she chose not to know — but of the movers and shakers, many of them directors: George Cukor, L.B. Mayer, David Lean, John Ford and John Huston. She details the problems with her biggest failure, “The Lake,” and tells of life behind the scenes, even passing on a recipe for currant cake (“really a sensation”) she was privileged to eat during filming for “The Corn is Green.”

The most revealing aspect of “Me” is Hepburn’s descriptions of her romances. Another side to Hepburn is seen: the mistakes, the selfishness and, finally, true love.

Hepburn is extremely self-critical about her relationships with her “beaux.” She says she believed Ludlow Odgen Smith, her first and only husband and better known as Luddy, was there to please her while she started her career. It pained her when she realized years later that she was “an absolute pig.”

Then there were the rather odd relationships with Leland Hayward and Howard Hughes. No commitment, no promises. And they were over.

Then it happened. It. True Love. Spencer Tracy.

For 27 years, until Tracy died in 1967, Hepburn found what she had never known. At 33, she discovered what love really means. “I would have done anything for him,” she writes. And she did. If Tracy didn’t like something about her, she set out to change it.

There were problems, very big problems. Tracy was married but Hepburn writes that the marriage was over long before she met him. Ultimately, Hepburn says, guilt paralyzed him. “One builds one’s own jail,” she says. “I never knew him, I think.”

“Me” is funny, sad, frank and completely Hepburn. These stories of her life show how she matures. It is in the chapter titled “Memorial Day” and the tale of planting the swamp bank in the 1950s with David Lean and his wife that she shows how much she has grown when she asks herself:

“… Have you accomplished all that you could have — given your beginnings? No, you have been careless. You did not get to the essence of things. … It’s a bit late now, but profit by this — if you do it — do it. Get those weeds out. And plant carefully.”

Janine Pineo is an editor on the NEWS display desk.