Yet in her new book, Me: Stories of My Life (420 pages. Knopf $25), Hepburn brings new meaning to the word disarming. She writes as she talks, in brisk sentences or sentence fragments, interrupted by exclamations and strung together with dashes. From her candid account of the loss of her “virtue” to her husband-to-be, Ludlow Ogden Smith, to her description of her older brother’s suicide, Hepburn makes it work. Since others have also written about her, her memoirs don’t reveal much that’s new. But there is one electrifying moment: a few days after Spencer Tracy died, Hepburn tried to befriend his widow. “But you see, I thought you were only a rumor,” Louise Tracy responded. Hepburn did not go to Tracy’s funeral. That morning, she went to the funeral home and helped lift his coffin into the hearse; then she followed it in her car partway to the church. In all her career, she never played a more poignant scene.
Though their relationship lasted 27 years, Tracy was a reticent lover. “I have no idea how Spence felt about me,” she writes. “I can only say I think that if he hadn’t liked me he wouldn’t have hung around. As simple as that.” We’ll have to take her word for it.
