Cynic's Corner
An Actor Without A Role
by Eric Mills, Our Town staff
Richard Gregory has a name that you wouldn’t know, but a face you would instantly recognize. For almost fifteen years, he has been appeared in commercials for Haverford’s Hardware, a small chain that, at its peak, had six stores scattered across the suburbs of central New Jersey. Though he had no affiliation with the chain outside of the advertisements, Gregory portrayed Wilfred, the crotchety old (and increasingly older) owner who was distressed by the lengths to which his son was willing to go to slash prices and please the customer. Wilfred always lost, of course, and the customer always one, which was the tagline that accompanied the spots.
But recently, it was announced that everyone would lose, because Haverford’s was going out of business in the face of competition from Home Depot and Lowe’s, both of which have increased their presence in the area. But what would happen to Gregory, the very public face of the company? Where would he go? What would he do?
***
Mr. Gregory is quick to tell you that he is not an actor, and indeed, he doesn’t look like a traditional actor. His skin is worn and decaying, his face covered with spots. He walks with a limp, the byproduct of an old football injury. His voice wavers and cracks when he speaks. He has a way of squinting when he isn’t paying attention. He is, without a doubt, an unlikely star.
“Acting was never a plan of mine,” he told me in the bright, spacious kitchen his comfortable Gloucester Street home over a cup of coffee. “It was just something I fell into, I guess.” Gregory was a backup running back as a sophomore in high school, but the aforementioned injury on the last practice of the season ended his dreams of starting the following year. “I needed something to do with my time,” he said, so he joined the school play. It was remarkably similar to the way I had stumbled into the newspaper office at my high school after my basketball coach had made me cry and quit the team after one particularly rigorous practice. We are the same, I thought.
“It was A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Mr. Gregory remembers with some difficulty, referring to the play that made Shakespeare rich. “I played Oberon. I didn’t know what a single word of what I was saying meant, but we made other people clap and laugh, and it was a hell of a feeling.” He acted again in his final two years, and then just as quickly as he had picked it up, Gregory put acting aside. “After high school, I figured that was it. I had had a fun time with it and everything, but it’s not something I was particularly good at.” He was being modest.
***
While Mr. Gregory rose the ranks at a state government office after high school, his childhood friend Tyler Haverford inherited his father’s hardware store. The store was profitable, but Tyler thought he could do better. He scouted property and bought another location a couple towns open. Then another and another. And then, years and years later after they had parted ways, Haverford found his old friend Richard again.
“He told me he wanted to do some spots and asked if I wanted to help him out,” Gregory remembers about his friend’s visit. “I said what the hell. I figured it would be a one-time thing.” Gregory had no idea that the spots would turn him into a local star.
I watched the first spot, “Hammer Headache,” in Gregory’s basement with Richard and his wife Sandy. The camera is shaky, the audio levels are inconsistent, the framing is sloppy—but the only thing you’ll notice if you watch the commercial is Richard. He foams at the mouth when his “son” announces his deep discount on hammers. At the end of the spot, his eyes sparkle when he sees that his son’s plan has worked out after all. His performance is akin to the gentle ebb and flow of a masterful line of prosaic description. He is a natural.
I told Gregory how taken I was with his performance, but he only shrugged. “It’s embarrassing for me to watch this, to be honest,” he told me. “I can’t bear to watch myself on tape.”
***
Gregory has no ambition to pursue acting now that his regular gig has ended. “It was just a hobby,” he tells me. “I feel bad for Ron more than anything” (Ron is Tyler’s son; Tyler died in November).
To me, this sounded like a textbook case of denial. Perhaps I was feeling insecure myself, because I had just heard that our own newspaper, subscription shrinking in the face of the Internet, was experiencing financial troubles of its own. But whatever my motivation, I let him have it. “Don’t you feel like you’ve wasted your whole life and all your talents here?” I asked him. “Don’t you have any ambition? Don’t you feel like you deserve better? Don’t you ever want to flee this popsicle stand and show those stuck-up New York nobodies that you’re just as good as they are? What about your gift?”
He laughed. “Gift? Acting’s not my gift.” With a shaky sweep of his enfeebled arm, he brought my attention to his house, his two dogs, the pictures of his children, his wife. “These are all my gifts.”
He smiled and I looked directly into his eyes. I broke the stare and looked down at the floor, shaking my head. What BS. And the worst thing was, I could see he believed it himself. Decades after stumbling onstage in high school, fooling an audience full of parents and his peers into believing that he was a fairy god, Chesterfield Ridge’s own master actor had fooled himself.
