Keeper Of the Famed

"I'm sorry I was so difficult," she says.

Friends and colleagues talk about her toughness and her loyalty in the same breath. Says comedy promoter Walter Latham, who worked with Bain during the "Kings of Comedy" tours and documentary, "There's constantly conflict. I've yelled at her, she's yelled at me . . . But at the end of the day, we've never lost respect for each other." They describe a woman who'll do anything for her friends, whether packing a carload of clothes after Katrina for Brazile's family in New Orleans or going to the hospital every day, always bringing food, when Masters Barry suffered a long illness in the '80s. But they also describe a woman who remains single and childless, a woman so focused on work that she often has to be dragged out to play, a workaholic who drops everything to be with her mother .

"I always tell her, 'Raymone, do you even look at a guy?' " says Jamie Foster Brown, publisher of the entertainment magazine Sister 2 Sister. "But she doesn't think about it."

Instead, Foster Brown says, she's constantly networking. Early on, Bain told her that they needed to get behind "this governor from Arkansas." Soon, Foster Brown says, Bain was helping Clinton out on the campaign trail, getting football players and comedians to endorse him.

She successfully wooed Babyface as a client some 15 years ago, memorizing his lyrics, showing up at events where she knew he would be. Soon, Bain convinced the press-shy singer-songwriter to get involved in political causes. In time, Babyface was attending Clinton fundraisers and spending the night at the White House, uniting Bain's two great loves: politics and pop culture.

"She likes to win," Foster Brown says. "She likes the smell of the hunt."

Trouble Is Her Specialty

Bain says she's not attracted to people in trouble, it's just that "sometimes when I start working for them, unfortunately things happen." Nevertheless, her six-page bio declares that "Crisis Management and Damage Control are specialty areas of expertise for Ms. Bain."

She and Marion Barry had never worked together when he was arrested for smoking crack in 1990. But she came to his house, he says, and sat with him. Comforted him. Prayed with him. Advised him on how to handle "a very dramatic situation for me, and the family and the city, too."

Just what Bain advised him to do on that day back in 1990, Barry won't say. "That's very personal," he says, "not intended to be put in the public domain." But he will say this: Throughout the years, through "all the controversy, she was always cool and calm. Whatever spin that we tried to put on it, that is what she did."

After all, he says, with a bit of a chuckle, "every story has two or three sides to it. That's what Tony Snow does with Bush."

The day Barry entered prison in 1991, Bain signed on as his spokeswoman.

"I told her she was crazy," Hughes says with a laugh. "I was like, 'Are you out of your mind, why would you take him on as a client? It's not like it's alleged. It's on video , girl.'

"She said he was really a brilliant man who loves this community and she felt an obligation to help him. She said, 'He has a terrible weakness and made a terrible mistake.' "

And Bain stayed with Barry, serving as his press secretary during his 1994 mayoral campaign and, following his reelection, as his press secretary at City Hall -- all the while continuing to run her own public relations business.

For friends and clients both, she's a fierce mama lion protecting her cubs. "She's the kind of person who will back you up if you fall down, and get in someone's face if you're in a fight," Donna Brazile says.

Her biggest challenge thus far: managing Michael Jackson. She came on board at a time when he was ensconced in Neverland, awaiting trial on child molestation charges, surrounded by members of the Nation of Islam. She was the latest in a long line of Jackson managers, crisis handlers and official spokespeople.

Says one former Jackson adviser who asked not to be identified for professional reasons, "Someone becomes close to Jackson and becomes his end all and be all, and then it's just a matter of time before they're moved out. . . You're not dealing with a stable individual."

The trial shoved Bain in front of the klieg lights, responsible for rehabilitating Jackson's image and managing the requests of 3,000 news outlets during a chaotic time. Besides the pajama incident, Jackson shopped Wal-Mart in a ski mask right before the trial. Then there was the circus outside the courtroom: the fans, the protesters, the people jockeying to make a buck.

"It was like Jesus at the temple," Bain says, "total chaos and confusion. It was infuriating me. This man's life was on the line."

Journalists covering the trial accused her of lying to them, including FoxTV.com columnist Roger Friedman, who blasted her for "misleading statements" about Neverland remaining open during the trial. Now, Friedman says, "I think she came in to Michael's situation without the necessary knowledge or tools. Because Michael lies to everybody. . . . At a time I might have been criticizing Raymone for disseminating misleading information, she might have been getting bad information from Michael."

To this day, Bain says she doesn't know who fired her during the trial. She got a call from a reporter asking if she'd been fired. An hour and a half later, someone slipped a letter under her hotel door confirming it, and that's all she knows.

Still, she has her suspicions.

Was it Randy Jackson, as has been widely speculated? (Through a family representative, the other members of the Jackson family declined to be interviewed for this article.)

"No one will step up to the plate and acknowledge" who wrote the letter, she says.

No matter, she says, Michael Jackson himself called to tell her the verdict was in and to ask where she was, saying he needed her by his side. She was happy to comply.

Now, she's trying to consolidate the 21 old businesses that make up the new company, coordinating the many lawsuits Jackson faces, including breach of contract suits brought by his former managers and a custody suit brought by his former wife, Debbie Rowe, which was settled last week. She's putting out fires in the press: No, Jackson won't be opening a leprechaun theme park in Ireland. And trying to resuscitate the singing career of a man once considered the world's greatest entertainer, a man who is at least $270 million in debt. (Bain declines to discuss how much she is getting paid by Jackson.)

She says that Jackson has been writing music since the trial and will be heading back to the studio in a few days, where he'll be working with some of the hottest producers in the industry--Babyface, Will.I.Am, Rodney Jerkins and Sean Garrett.

"Michael Jackson is a good man," Bain says. "He's very brilliant, very sensitive. And it's unfortunate what's happened to him over the years. But he's going to take care of it.

" We're going to take care of it."

Staff researcher Karl Evanzz contributed to this report.