Picture this: Katharine Hepburn and her chauffeur stopped for speeding in the tiny town of Blackwell, Okla. Hepburn berates the strapping young officer as a "moron" and "dumbbell," then adds, "If I ever found an Oklahoma car in Connecticut, I would flatten all the tires."

What could be a scene from a screwball comedy is actually drawn from Hepburn's real life—at least her version of it.

A typed, single-spaced account of the arrest during a 1950-51 tour of Shakespeare's "As You Like It" was in one of 22 boxes of papers from Hepburn's theater career that have been donated to the New York Public Library.