In the last summer before the millennium, Baz Luhrmann’s Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen) gently racketed through radio speakers and headphones around the world.

The Australian film director was better known for creating Romeo + Juliet, the film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s tragedy which catapulted Leonardo DiCaprio to success - and the bedroom walls of millions of teenage girls. But the single, featuring the gravelly, voice of Australian actor Lee Perry, rose up the charts after telling listeners to “do one thing every day that scares you” and not to “waste your time on jealousy”, over a laid-back, melancholic sample of the choral version of Rozalla’s Everybody's Free To Feel Good.

But Luhrmann never wrote those words. Rather, they had been composed on a sunny, late Spring afternoon after a walk around Lake Michigan, by Chicago Tribute journalist Mary Schmich. Schmich, now 63, continues to write her column three times a week for the paper.

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Her involvement is barely known, or spoken about. But then that has nearly always been the way: Smich’s column, Wear Sunscreen, was mis-attributed almost immediately after it was printed, to American author Kurt Vonnegut. Published during the internet’s infancy, its path to popular culture is one riddled with the miscommunication that has become synonymous with the web.

While Smich’s attribution may have been lost over the decades, her words haven’t. She is contacted by people who have used it to learn English, because of it short sentences. Those who have grown up with it find different lines resonating more strongly as they age. Ru Paul has been routinely tweeting lines of it for years. Ironically, as its creation saw Smich accused of plagiarism herself, its adoption saw one high school principal fired.

Mary Schmich credit: Chicago Tribune

Twenty years after Smich first wrote Wear Sunscreen, she told The Telegraph its story:

Where did the idea come from?

It was a Friday, I was on my third column of the week and I was out of ideas. But I was walking to work along Lake Michigan and I saw this young woman out sunbathing. And I just thought, “I hope she’s wearing sunscreen”. I kept walking and I thought, it’s graduation time, I could write a mock-graduation speech for my column. I was 43 then, an age where I thought I had all this advice I would like to administer to young people. So I sat down and I wrote what I would tell 18 to 24-year-olds.

Was that advice things you wish you’d known, or advice you’d already given?

Where does the stuff you write come from? I have no idea. Looking back I have a whole mythology about how that column happened. I was just channelling something, whatever came to my head. It really was not super carefully considered, that was written in four hours.

How did it start to gain traction?

There was no such thing as online publishing at the time. Email was relatively new, I know this is hard to imagine, but there were some people who didn’t have email and the people who did were excited by it still. So this thing started going around in the early internet. It was one of the first viral things, people just started emailing it to each-other. It went viral by email, mostly.

So people typed out the column and emailed it to each other?

Well, this is the mystery at the heart of all of this. Somewhere along the way, someone stripped my name off it, and put Kurt Vonnegut’s name on it, and started passing it around as the graduation speech that the great American writer Kurt Vonnegut had given at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and it just exploded from there. Because not only did you have these nuggets of advice, you had them coming from the great Kurt Vonnegut.

It’s such a weird thing to do, that’s quite a lot of work involved in that.

Exactly! This is the big speculation. Did someone transmit it without any name on it, and then someone said, “Gosh, this sounds like Kurt Vonnegut?” I have no idea. Honestly, nobody has ever figured out how that happened. Kurt Vonnegut was among the most mystified.

Did you speak to him about it?

Kurt Vonnegut credit: AP

Oh, a number of times. He’s no longer with us, but yes, we had some very entertaining exchanges about it. He started working it into his schtick. I sometimes felt bad for him because he’s one of the lionised American writers and there was a period of years where everywhere he would go, everyone would want to talk to him about sunscreen. I felt really sorry for the guy!

Did he begin to go along with it?

No, he would always say it was mine. But more than once he gave a speech that would include the line, “wear sunscreen”, just as a wink. That was his way of acknowledging all that had happened.

How long did it take to go viral?

It was about a month after I wrote it. All of a sudden, in the course of about two days, it exploded. I don’t know at what point it got into the ether, but it was later in that summer I got several emails one Friday morning from people saying: “I just got this email, a graduation speech, which says it’s by Kurt Vonnegut but I remember reading it your column. What’s going on? Did you plagiarise Kurt Vonnegut?”

Of course, that panicked me. I had a moment when I thought, “Oh god, did I?”

Did it get you into trouble at all?

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I didn’t let it get that far. The minute I heard about it I went to my editors and I said, “Something very weird is going on and I have no idea what it is. But I’m going to track it down”. I spent that Friday calling around. I called MIT, and they said, “People have been calling us! Kurt Vonnegut wasn’t even our commencement speaker! It was Kofi Annan!”

Then I started trying to track down Vonnegut, and finally after a circuitous route I did, and he did the same thing, saying, “Oh! It’s you! People keep calling me! My wife called me saying, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you did the commencement speech at MIT?’”

I knew I had to quash that very quickly. But I got another column out of it.

Before it went viral, did you have any unusual reaction to the column when it ran in print?

I did get a lot of snail mail, and a little bit of email, about it. I got a lot of response to it, there were people who liked it and I thought that was nice, then moved on.

Did you think, when you filed it, that it was a particularly resonant piece of writing?

When I filed it I had some feeling for it. It’s not that I thought, “That is the world’s best column”, but I had some feeling for it. It made me feel something.

It reads very differently when you know that it was written by a woman. Were you speaking to a younger self?

Maybe, I don’t know. With writing, you sit down and it comes. You can overthink it later, but when you’re doing it, when it’s working, it’s just happening. People have said to me, “I knew that wasn’t Vonnegut the minute I read the line, ‘You are not as fat as you imagine’. That is something a woman would write”. And I said, “You’re absolutely right”.

How did Baz Luhrmann get in touch?

Catherine Martin and Baz Luhrmann at the Met Ball, 2017

One of the people who got it in his emails was a young man named Anton [Monstead] who was working with Baz. He took it to Baz, and they were in the process of putting together a CD of music that had been used in various movies. You’ve got to remember that Baz wasn’t known to many people outside of Australia. I happen to know he was because I’d seen Strictly Ballroom, but almost nobody I knew had heard of him.

So I get this voicemail from a man with an Australian accent, and it’s Baz, saying, “I have an idea for the material”. He’s explaining that he thought it was Vonnegut and they’d tried to get in touch with him, and then they discovered it was me.

He had an idea of taking those words and putting them over some music that he had used in William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. I’ve heard him say that he was just planning to use it as hold music for their office phone line.

So how did it get on the air?

When Baz made it, it was seven minutes long. You can’t run anything in the US radio market that’s seven minutes long. But it became a big hit in Australia very quickly. And I thought, “That’s cool, big hit in Australia”.

Then there were a couple of radio stations in the US, one in Santa Monica, California, that were playing the seven-minute version, because they played alt music. Another was in Portland, Oregon, and they stripped out the two minutes of musical interlude and they had a five-minute spoken word piece. They started playing it, and it became a huge hit in Portland.

What changed everything was when a freelance writer in Portland did a little blurb for the New York Times Magazine about this cult hit in Portland. Then the whole thing took off.

The following day, my phone started exploding with radio DJs and reporters wanting to interview me about it. Somehow my home phone number got on some list so every DJ in America had my number and was calling to get me on live.

So at least at that point people realised that you, not Vonnegut or Luhrmann, had written it.

Right. But if you go out there today, I think most people think it’s written by Baz. And you know what, I’m fine with that, Baz gave it a life, Baz would never have taken credit for it. But it is weird how hard it is to squash something once it’s out there incorrectly. Just a few months ago I got an email from a woman excoriating me for claiming I had written Kurt Vonnegut’s speech. I just laughed out loud – you can’t kill the inaccuracy.

And did Luhrmann pay you?

Well, technically the words belong to The Chicago Tribune. But Baz was very generous with me. Once it became clear what was happening, that this song was going to sell, he was quite generous with me. I have no complaints. I get royalties, although it doesn’t make me a rich woman, I’d like to point that out. I’m a hard-working, average journalist! But yes, in its heyday, I got a significant payment, and to this day I still get a little bit. But it was never calculated, I never tried to write a hit song.

But your words comprise a hit song.

That’s the lesson in it, about writing. Especially for journalists. We come in and we do it, day after day, and you’re never sure what’s penetrating. And it’s work, even if you like it, it’s work. But if you just do it, and do it, and do it, and do it, every now and then, when you least expect it, something pop outs into the universe and resonates in a bigger way than you ever anticipated.

Were you surprised by its success?

How could you not be surprised? I’ve had many weird things happen in my life, but this is just the weirdest.

Would you mind being known for Wear Sunscreen?

No, I’m very fond of it. I like the idea that it seems to have meant a lot to many people. I’ve written so much in my life, I’ve been a journalist for 37 years. To have even one thing that endures is very gratifying.

Do you stick by the advice in it?

I do, although the world has changed. I look at it sometimes and it seems a little dated. “Throw away your old bank statements”? Nobody has bank statements anymore! Nobody even has love letters anymore! Keep your love emails.

Is there any that you’d add in?

Oh, people ask me that sometimes. I’m sure there are, but most of them would probably be things that my mother used to say: “It will always look better in the morning”, and “there’s more than one way to live”. To me, the whole little piece comes down to that idea, that there’s more than one way to live.