Is a Fairy-Tale Ending in Store?

Marisol Nichols and Mark-Paul Gosselaar were plowing through their first scene on NBC’s “The Princess & the Marine” in October when they saw a couple who looked just like them approach the set, sit behind the camera, put on headphones and watch.

Nichols and Gosselaar were shooting an incident that took place less than a year ago in Manama, the capital of the Middle Eastern island nation of Bahrain. Dressed for the role of a Bahraini sheika, Nichols wore long, wavy extensions in her black hair and a traditional Islamic veil. As she listened to Gosselaar beg her to come to the United States, the real Meriam Al-Khalifa Johnson watched the scene wearing blue jeans, a half-shirt and a tiny tattoo on her back.

Meriam was, after all, a consultant on her own life story.

In one of Hollywood’s quickest turnarounds, “The Princess & the Marine” will air Sunday night, eight months after Jason Johnson alerted a San Diego television station about their escape from Bahrain in the hopes that publicity might facilitate Meriam’s political asylum application. If her asylum is denied, she will be sent back to a country where women are forced into prearranged marriages.

As a member of Bahrain’s royal family who defied her family and Islamic tradition to live with an American, Meriam would no longer be considered marriageable, and she says she would be forced to live in a sort of social quarantine.

Technically, Meriam is not a princess, but the title of NBC’s movie is one of the few liberties Hollywood took. The rest of the script was approved by the Johnsons, who are now married and living in Las Vegas. By most accounts, pains were taken to be accurate to the U.S. Marine Corps and the Bahraini royal family.

The details of the couple’s covert courtship are extraordinary, and Gosselaar--like many viewers might--doubted the script’s veracity.

“When I began reading it, it just didn’t ring true,” he said. “I’ve been to the Middle East, and I thought it had to be fictional.”

The couple first met randomly--literally. Frustrated with her cloistered life, Meriam often sat in her bedroom dialing random local numbers with hopes of meeting interesting young people. In February 1999, three months after Jason arrived to serve on a security force in Bahrain, a Marine received a call from a girl named Meriam who agreed to a meeting at the Seef mall. Jason tagged along, and he and Meriam became quick friends, despite cultural law that prevented them from openly socializing.

“We’re not supposed to talk to guys at all--Muslim or not,” said Meriam. “So we talked a lot by phone, which I had in my room.”

Over several months, Jason and Meriam met in movie theaters and the mall, but when the rendezvous were discovered by Meriam’s mother, communication was shut off.

Meriam, who was 17 at the time, was forbidden to stay after school, use the telephone or go to the Seef mall alone. She would find reasons to accompany her mother or sisters to the mall, where she would leave letters for Jason with a shopkeeper.

“The [shopkeeper] is not Muslim,” Meriam said. “So it was OK for her to talk to Jason.”

The shopkeeper became an intermediary, sometimes handing over dozens of Jason’s letters. The type of store and the appearance of the shopkeeper have been altered for the movie, to protect the woman from reprisals back in Bahrain.

As his tour came to an end, Jason constructed a plan for smuggling Meriam out of the country, defying undercover police officers who were following her. Disguised as a Marine, Meriam presented forged military documents at the airport that Jason had furnished for her. When the couple arrived in Chicago, however, INS agents immediately apprehended Meriam. She was an underage, illegal immigrant whose family had tracked her down.

“She was in fact put in a holding cell in an orange jumpsuit. Meriam was able to give us some details of her incarceration--the terror she felt being separated from Jason, the panic she felt when she was told Jason had gone on to Las Vegas and abandoned her,” said Mike Robe, the director. “I think everyone can identify with that emotional vulnerability.”

After five days, Meriam was set free with instructions to reappear in 60 days for the first of her asylum hearings. Jason was eventually court-martialed for forging the documents and busted from lance corporal to private. Desperate for some leverage with the INS, Jason contacted a San Diego television station, which released their story.

For producer Mary L. Aloe, the story had all the elements of a Hollywood drama: forbidden love, danger, the American dream. Aloe wanted the rights.

By then, Meriam and Jason were traveling with off-duty Marines, having begun to receive death threats from what they suspect are Islamic extremists.

“At that point Meriam was just 18. We met at a restaurant called Cravings on Sunset Drive,” Aloe said. “They got lost and brought a friend called Smith, a fellow Marine who didn’t crack a smile.”

Jason remembers faking his way through the entire meeting, although Aloe said she was impressed by his savvy.

“I had no idea what I was doing when I was talking to these people. I brought a friend, because we always went out with other details, for security issues,” said Jason, who was given an honorable discharge by the Marine Corps in September so that he could protect his wife.

Most of his time now is occupied with promoting the movie and consulting on the couple’s book deal.

“[The movie] is true and not true at the same time,” he said. “They had to take a year’s worth of events and compress it into an hour and 40 minutes.”

That hour and 40 minutes might just make Nichols’ career. The Chicago native appears in almost every scene of the drama in her first starring role of a major network project.

“I auditioned early November,” she said. “I found out I got it, and three days later we started shooting.”

Playing Meriam in a highly promoted show caps off a nearly perfect year for her; Nichols nabbed a regular part in Showtime’s “Resurrection Blvd.,” a weekly drama about a Latino family in East L.A. that the cable network renewed for a second season. She plays Victoria Santiago, the younger sister she describes as “definitely a tough Latina.” But NBC’s “Princess” presented Nichols with an even tougher role that required her to be sexually innocent as well as savvy.

“The scenes in the mall were the easiest because she’s at her lightest and she’s youngest,” Nichols said. “The hardest one for me to do was the interrogation scene, where I tell the INS agents about the woman from Saudi Arabia who came back with her British husband and had to go [into hiding until they could safely escape the country]. It tore me up.”

For Meriam, an asylum hearing originally scheduled for earlier this month has been postponed. The couple may or may not have a fairy-tale ending, but for now Hollywood is providing an idyllic setting. The Johnsons say, and the producers confirm, that the couple received a sizable sum for the rights to their story as well as the book deal, though they decline to be specific. In the coming months they will tell their story at college campuses.