NONFICTION : ME: Stories of My Life <i> by Katharine Hepburn (Knopf: $25; 418 pp.).</i>

Wanting more than our performing artists can express in the medium they have chosen, we try to entice words out of them. But as is evident in this autobiography, coaxed out of a publicity-shy superstar for a reported $4.5 million, the mere fact that these artists are fluent in one medium does not mean they will be so in another. Take the photo here of Hepburn after the death of the man we all watched her fall in love with: Spencer Tracy. Hepburn’s pose is poignantly telling: teary eyes stare blankly while pursed lips suggest an inner strength. But when we turn to the text to see what Tracy meant to her, we get only this: “I found him--totally--totally--total!”

“Me” is supposedly written in a revelatory stream of consciousness, in “flashes . . . of this-that-no no the other thing,” but Hepburn won’t permit the stream to flow into any deep psychic recesses. Still, one suspects we are seeing “the real Kate,” for the secret to her famous vitality seems to be living life in a rushing stream of activity, avoiding pools of introspection so she can gracefully change form to fit the shape of the moment .