Bill Cardoso; journalist helped define Hunter Thompson image
If it weren't for Bill Cardoso, gonzo journalism might have gone by another name -- if it had been named at all.
''You've changed everything," he said in a letter to Hunter S. Thompson after reading ''The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved," a celebrated 1970 magazine article that essentially was transcribed from notes Thompson had scrawled in a haze of alcohol and drugs. ''It's totally gonzo."
And with that, Thompson's prose had a sobriquet to match his radically defiant approach to reporting: gonzo journalism. He embraced the term, which eventually entered the lexicon along with Thompson's famous phrase ''fear and loathing." In his most famous book, ''Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," published in 1972, Thompson's lawyer identifies himself as ''Doctor Gonzo."
''Hunter had never heard the word before, and I had never heard the word before," Ralph Steadman, the British artist who illustrated much of Thompson's work, said of the moniker Mr. Cardoso used. ''It was a helluva name and it captured what it was we were doing: something silly -- something totally silly and rather dangerous. I always felt every time I came to America and worked with Hunter that we were on a dangerous mission. Gonzo was dangerous."
Mr. Cardoso, a former editor of The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine who went on to write richly evocative articles for publications such as Esquire, Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy, and Ramparts, died of heart failure Feb. 26 at his home in Kelseyville, Calif. He was 68 and even though he lived most of his life in California, Mr. Cardoso always thought of himself as a Bostonian, writing about his home with reverence.
''To Fenway, to see baseball played the way our fathers played it, on real grass, come the humble and the Lowells," he began an article about the 1975 World Series between the Red Sox and Cincinnati Reds.
William J. Cardoso was born in Cambridge and grew up in Somerville. His daughter, Linda, said Mr. Cardoso's father was an immigrant, born to an aristocratic family in Portugal; his mother was from New Bedford and was of Portuguese descent.
The youngest of three brothers, Mr. Cardoso was a good athlete and stayed passionate about sports throughout his life, cheering for the Red Sox and the Patriots from afar, said his one surviving brother, Gilbert, of Centerville. He graduated from Somerville High School and from Boston University, where he studied journalism and began writing professionally, covering sports for the Medford Mercury. After college, he worked for the Valley News in West Lebanon, N.H., then jumped to the Concord Monitor in the state's capital.
In June of 1967 he was hired by the Globe to roam and report from the three northern New England states, and he covered Edmund Muskie during the final eight days of the 1968 presidential campaign when the US senator from Maine was the Democrats' vice presidential candidate. A few weeks after the election, Mr. Cardoso became editor of the Globe Sunday magazine.
''I remember his energy and his persuasion and charm -- he had them all," said Martin F. Nolan, a former editorial page editor at the Globe. ''He was a very good reporter."
Legend has it that he met Thompson on a press bus during the 1968 presidential campaign. Mr. Cardoso complimented Thompson's book on the Hell's Angels, and they smoked marijuana together, according to a collection of Thompson's letters. Through unsparing and often unsober eyes, Thompson apparently saw him as a kindred spirit. In a letter to a literary agent after Mr. Cardoso took over as Sunday magazine editor, Thompson wrote that his friend was ''in truth, a giant real freak . . . the fact that the Globe would make him editor of their Sunday mag fills me with a kind of mean karate optimism for the future. Billy Cardoso -- remember that name; he'll probably be editor of Esquire in two years."
Instead, Mr. Cardoso left the Globe and ended up in the Canary Islands, where he was part-owner of The Half Note, a jazz club. Eventually he missed writing and moved to back to the United States. He settled in California and was part of a coterie of writers whose work appeared in Rolling Stone and other hip publications, blazing a trail that became part of the New Journalism aesthetic.
Some of them also embraced the gonzo work ethic popularized in Thompson's books: bouts of intense creativity leavened with equally rigorous nights and weekends of drinking and sampling drugs. Mr. Cardoso's preferred vices, often mentioned in his writings, were top-shelf alcohol, marijuana, and hard-to-find Picayune cigarettes.
Among his closest friends was Jack Thibeau, a writer and actor who played one of the two brothers who made a prison break with Clint Eastwood's character in ''Escape from Alcatraz."
''When he was writing he wouldn't communicate with anybody -- it was fast and furious," said Thibeau, who lives in Pasadena, Calif. ''He would go into a fury of writing, because it had to be done right now. It consumed him. I walked in on him a couple of times and I saw him take a break from writing. His eyes were unfocused and he really couldn't think of anything else."
That approach dated at least to his days with the Globe.
''He loved being a reporter," said Linda Cardoso of Sherman Oaks, Calif. When it was time to produce copy, she said, ''he would lock himself up in his office at night. He liked to write at night."
Mr. Cardoso later wrote for United Press International's Los Angeles bureau until the wire service closed. In 1984, a collection of his magazine pieces was published in the book ''The Maltese Sangweech & Other
After that, freelance assignments were infrequent and he often was short of cash. While his talent made him a favorite to many, Mr. Cardoso seemed to lack the self-promotion gene, his daughter said. But he kept writing -- despite being diagnosed with cancer of the larynx several years ago.
Mr. Cardoso was married and divorced twice. Throughout his life, he would find ways to work into conversation a mention of his favorite accomplishment: pitching a no-hitter when he was in ninth grade.
''Even up until the end his heart remained in Boston," Mary Miles Ryan, his longtime companion, said in a telephone interview from the couple's Kelseyville home. ''He never adopted any other place. He literally cried when those BoSox won the World Series -- there was one very proud fellow. He really never was a Californian. He was a Bostonian."
A memorial service will be held in California at a later date.
