One Couple’s Very Long Walk Down the Aisle

This is a holiday love story to be told in a high-ceilinged room with a viola playing softly in a corner. There should be tall windows looking out over the Pacific on the Big Sur Road. There should be a fire of pinon and oak flickering in a fireplace made of rocks from the river.

The story begins more than 50 years ago on the Stanford campus. The girl is Mary Anita Loos, a third-generation Californian, with a cloud of soft brown hair and large brown eyes. Her middle name is after her celebrated aunt, the novelist and screenwriter Anita Loos.

The boy is Carl von Saltza. He is tall and blond and the von in his name tells of his noble Swedish birth.

They fell in love and became engaged. “Mary Yost, the Stanford dean of women, even gave me a cookbook which was her custom with newly engaged girls,” Mary Loos said the other day, sitting in her welcoming house in Santa Monica Canyon.

Carl gave Mary an amethyst ring with the von Saltza crest in heavy gold holding the jewel. It had been left to Carl by his great-grandfather, who was the Swedish ambassador to England, and a secret compartment in the ring held a tiny lock of Carl’s great-grandmother’s hair.

Mary’s father, Dr. H. Clifford Loos who was co-founder of the Ross Loos Medical Group of California, told the young couple the engagement and marriage were impossible. He pointed out that the country was in the middle of a deep economic depression and they weren’t even out of school.

How would they eat? Who would pay the rent? The engagement frayed away, unraveled by the cruel financial realities of the time.

The couple saw each other again in New York in 1938 when Mary was beginning a successful public relations career and Carl was on a trip to see his father.

Then came 1941 and the war. Carl joined the U. S. Army Air Corps and Mary decided to come back to Hollywood because she wanted to do something more creative.

When Mary Loos came back to Hollywood, she met and married Richard Sale, a screenwriter and novelist. She said, “It was a great writing team but never a great marriage.”

They wrote 17 successful motion pictures--among them “Gentlemen Marry Brunettes,” “The Wackiest Ship in the Army,” and “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies”--and were on the crest of Hollywood aristocracy for more than 20 years.

“When we split up, I took our son, Edward, and bought this house in Santa Monica Canyon. I didn’t know what I would do,” Loos said.

She worked as a screenwriter and story and production consultant. She wrote four novels.

Her son, Edward, who is musically gifted, lives with her. He composes on the keyboard and helps teach autistic children at a nearby school.

Now for the end of the love story.

“On May 4, 1989 I was visiting my dear friend, Neva Sawyer, at her ranch near Paso Robles,” Loos said. “It was a gray day and one of us suggested driving up to Monterey for lunch. We were trying to find the mouth of the Carmel Valley but we were lost and on the wrong road and I glanced out the window and on a mailbox was the name Carl von Saltza.

“I said to Neva, ‘My God, that’s the man I should have married. Do you suppose it’s his son?’ ”

Mary Loos asked for the number from information and called and found it was her Carl von Saltza.

“We burned up the telephones and the mail and I agreed to meet him in Monterey. I got off the plane and this tall, handsome man walked toward me, looking exactly the same except for gray hair instead of blond.

“We were in our late 70s but we were 20.

“First we shook hands, then we put our arms around each other and cried.

“It was Carl’s birthday weekend and I met his two sons, two daughters, five grandchildren at a barbecue. He has three hunting dogs, two cats and a Lippizaner horse. He lives on 14 acres that hold a well-built country house. He also has a cabin in Bixby Canyon on the Big Sur Road.”

His wife had died some months before. “He started to talk about getting married and I kept saying ‘It’s a long way and a long time. I have been alone for 20 years.’

“Then one day, he said, ‘I really think we should get married,’ and I said, ‘Oh, oh yes.’ So we will be married on Jan. 6 in my father’s house in Santa Monica Canyon.”

The house now belongs to Patricia Nettleship, who owns the North Construction Co. “When I told her about Carl and me, she said ‘Of course you will be married in your father’s house.’ ” The rehearsal dinner will be given by Madame Sylvia Woo for 32 relatives and close friends.

The next day Loos will walk down a long galleria where she and Carl will be married and he will slip a wedding band on her finger to go with his great-grandfather’s amethyst that Loos has been wearing since the day she was lost on Aguajita Road in Monterey and found her love again. She will wear a dress selected by Maria Albert, the daughter of her childhood friend, the late Margo Albert who was one of her attendants the first time she married. The other attendant at her first wedding will be with her again. She is Margaret Tallichet Wyler, widow of director William Wyler.

“Talley said, ‘I was with you the first time and I’ll be with you this time whether you like it or not.’ I liked it.”

Loos’ son Edward will play and sing the song he wrote for them. He calls it the happiness waltz.

Happiness--bells were meant to ring. Happiness--birds were meant to sing,

Through the years like the tallest tree

Now it’s time love was meant to be.

I wish you happiness

I wish you love and hope.

I wish you health

I wish you wealth

And peace in your dreams through the years.

Like the tallest tree now it’s time

Love was meant to be.

The newlyweds will divide their time between her house and his. In the spring, they will travel to Europe to see relatives and friends and to look up Carl’s family.

And that’s the new beginning of the love story for Carl and Mary that started more than 50 years ago. Now it’s time. This love was meant to be.