The first wife of the late “Law and Order” star Jerry Orbach yesterday defended her son’s poison-pen letter to his stepmother – the actor’s second wife – and took her own shot at the woman, calling her dimwitted and controlling.
“She’s funny looking and she wears polyester pantsuits, and that just makes me laugh,” said Marta Curro, 75, who separated from Orbach in 1975. “There’s nothing funnier to me than stupid people being evil, because they put a tack on your chair and expect it to kill you.”
As The Post reported exclusively Sunday, Curro’s son, Chris, 39, sent a vitriol-filled missive to his stepmother, Elaine Cancilla-Orbach, claiming she manipulated Orbach into cutting him out of his will.
While the will sets aside funds from Orbach’s $10 million estate for his children, the money is to be held in trust until Cancilla-Orbach dies.
Chris Orbach was also furious about the decision to donate his father’s eyes, recalling how he had to leave the room where the actor’s body was lying so “some guy with an ice box could shuck his eyes out.”
In an interview, Curro said she’d been aware of how her son felt, but had advised him not to pour out his frustrations to Cancilla-Orbach.
“I said be careful, because she’s not very smart,” Curro told The Post. “I said it may be best to write it and not send it. He sent me a copy of it. I was shocked by half the stuff in there. I know his feelings were very badly hurt. You know how people can equate money with love.”
Still, in the same breath, she lauded her son for standing up for himself.
“I’m really thrilled that Chris is not a hypocrite,” she said. “He was having a hard time sucking up to her.”
Asked how she felt about the will, she said it was none of her business because it was between the sons and their stepmother.
Curro said she had mixed feelings about the actor’s decision to donate his eyes.
“I was sitting on the subway one time,” she said, “and I looked up and saw a picture of Jerry and it was the Eye Bank ad, and I thought, ‘Nobody on this train knows how freaked out I am.’ ”
Elaine Cancilla-Orbach, who married the actor in 1979, didn’t return a message left at her home. But speaking to The Post last week, she denied influencing her husband to donate his eyes or change his will.
“I could not believe what I was reading,” she said. “Actually, untruths and variations on stories and whatever, and I didn’t know who [Chris] was talking about.”
Orbach and Curro were married 17 years.
Curro said that years later, after the divorce – and even after her ex began dating Elaine Cancilla – he remained in close touch with her, although possibly without his new wife’s knowledge.
“He used to call me every Friday when she went out,” Curro said. “He would whisper in the phone, ‘She wants me to marry her.’
“Jerry and I were friends, and I always laughed at this person. But I stopped laughing when she started hurting my kids.”