"Maybe I'm just insane," author and Rolling Stone contributing editor Steve Knopper says with a laugh of his motivation for taking on the mammoth task of writing a Michael Jackson biography. "I love tackling big, weighty subjects. Maybe too much so." The challenges of telling the story of the King of Pop, the entire one—from his childhood fame with the Jackson 5 to his untouchable solo career, his child molestation charges to his untimely death—are basically endless. So to help him write MJ: The Genius of Michael Jackson (out this week via Simon & Schuster), the journalist interviewed more than 400 people, each in some way associated with the late pop singer.

To get to the heart of the material in MJ, Esquire asked Knopper to talk about the stories he learned from his five most insightful interview subjects. Some of the selections will surprise you.

Donald Trump on MJ and Lisa Marie's True Love and Michael's Fall

"I actually spoke with Trump about two months before he announced his candidacy for president. Putting his politics aside, because I have to, he was great. I'm not the first person to have talked to him for a Michael Jackson project. He comes into the story at crucial points. Michael stayed at Trump Tower when he was working on the HIStory: Past, Present, and Future, Book 1 album in New York City. And then there was a key period when Michael and [former wife] Lisa Marie [Presley] had their honeymoon at the big resort that Trump owned, called the Mar-a-Lago, in Florida. So the reason he's important to this story is that he's the closest you have to an eyewitness that Michael and Lisa Marie were perhaps actually in love. Or at least someone who will talk about it. He remembers that they went into the tower—they had this tower they were staying in at the resort—and they would just stay there for days and days. It was a very enclosed area. He said they were clearly in love. But to me, that's not the thing that was most important. He went on these asides. And I just let him talk. He gave me this forest-through-the-trees explanation of Michael: The first 30 years of Michael's life, he was just untouchable. He did everything right: He made all the best music, he made all the business deals, he had all the right people around him. And the last 20 or so years of his life, the reverse happened: He was on drugs, he was surrounding himself with 'yes' men, one business partner after another gave him bad advice, and he wasn't really working on music much anymore. Trump's point was that these are two different people, and they have to be looked at in two different ways. I thought that was pretty insightful."

Michael Jackson's Troubled Childhood at Motown

"I forget her official title at Motown, but Suzee Ikeda was more or less [Motown founder] Berry Gordy's assistant. She originally started at Motown as a singer and put out a couple singles—kind of Diana Ross-style songs. They didn't really go anywhere. Instead, it turned out, she was good at management and helping other people at the company. So eventually she worked into this position at Motown as a kind of liaison between Gordy and the producers and the Jackson 5. She wound up being this soothing figure for Michael. She worked really closely with Michael throughout the entire Motown years in LA. I was proud of myself for finding her. She has no Internet presence at all. She is off the grid in that sense. I tracked down an obituary of some relative she had and she was listed in the survivors. I contacted every single person I could find in that list of relatives and eventually someone got to her and she called me back. I probably talked to her 10 or 15 times, and she was just incredibly helpful. There were certain things she wanted to say and certain things she didn't want to say. But she was the one that told me some great stuff about Michael. Like how he would doodle cartoons in between sessions at Motown. There would be cartoons and caricatures all over the place. And then his producer just threw them all in the trash one day because he was annoyed at some other thing. She told me how Michael would stand on a crate in order to be the same height as his brothers at the microphone. Even more importantly, he was only nine or 10 years old and he needed an older-sibling figure who wasn't his brother. He needed a soothing adult like Suzee who would listen to him. Michael was working a lot with the producer Hal Davis at the time. The sense I got was that Hal's bedside manner with artists was not always amazing. So there would be points where Hal would tell Michael to do something and Michael would turn to Suzee and whisper, 'I don't think I should do it that way.' And Suzee would be like, 'Do it however you want!' She was also the one who held his head while he sang because he liked to dance around but it was screwing up the microphone. All these great, little details."

The Missing Jackson 5 Member on Michael's Practical Jokes

"The Jackson 5 was obviously the five Jackson brothers, but there were also two other guys. One was a guy named Johnny Jackson, who was their drummer throughout the glory years of the Jackson 5. He was not related to them, although at the time they said he was. He's since died. The other was a keyboard player named Ronnie Rancifer. I'm embarrassed to say, when I started this book, I didn't know Ronnie was still alive. I was searching the web and went, Holy crap! Ronnie Rancifer's alive! He was with the Jackson 5 practically their entire run. They hired him to be their keyboardist right around the time that they signed with Motown all the point to where Jermaine [Jackson] left the band and they signed with CBS. He saw all of it. So today he is in this classic-rock covers garage band in Hobart, Indiana, called Shuddup 'N' Drive. I wound up visiting the Gary, Indiana, area and I ended up going and seeing Ronnie's band play at an American Legion Hall on Halloween night, 2012. And there was Ronnie playing keyboards. It's like going to some random jazz place and there is Miles Davis playing trumpet. He is an incredible keyboardist. It was just bizarre. Afterward, he and I drank beer and talked about Motown and the Jackson 5. He was useful for filling in gaps. What I wanted, especially during the Jackson 5 time, was Michael's comedic voice. When he was going out with friends, I wanted to know how he joked with them or with his brothers. People always say Michael was a practical jokester. Well, what kind of jokes did he play? Ronnie filled in a lot of that stuff. He told me if you were in the Jackson 5 van touring the country, Michael was the guy who was going to make fun of you the harshest. If you were wearing new glasses, he'd go, 'Man, you got microscopes on!' He would put the bucket of water up on the door and it would spill on you when you walked in the room."

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The Insane Shoot for Michael Jackson's Military-Inspired Video

"Rupert Wainwright is a longtime British video director. He had directed a crappy kids movie, and he even acknowledged it was crappy. It was a dud. It tanked. But Michael somehow loved this movie. So one night, Michael's people called Rupert and said, 'Michael wants to see you at Neverland [Ranch].' Rupert flew in on a helicopter. Michael ended up enlisting Rupert as the director for the HIStory teaser video. They shot it in Budapest. That was the infamous video where Michael is sort of this dictator figure. In Michael's mind, he was this beloved Dalai Lama-type figure, but if you watch it today, there's a little bit of this fascist imagery that people were concerned about. The video shoot is just an epic story. This is before CGI, so they needed to get hundreds of soldiers to wear the same uniform and march in formation throughout Budapest. Some of them, though, right in the middle of the shoot, had to be pressed into military duty for the war between Croatia and Serbia in order to protect their own borders. At the last minute, all the troops Wainwright had hired were not available to him. So they had to find some local police-academy cadets instead. They were all set to do it, but the time they were supposed to shoo the video, the cadets were all taking their police-academy exams. So Rupert and his people had to pull up in front of the exam-testing facility and as soon as the cadets were done, they hopped in the van and immediately went to shoot the video. He just had a bunch of great stories like that. It was one story after the other. But that was Michael: Anyone who worked with him had some elaborate, crazy story to tell."

will.i.am on the Rivalry Between MJ and Prince

"He was in an interesting position with Michael. Because Will was famous by the time he started working with Michael, and he also got to him late in Michael's career. But the two of them, from what I can tell, seemed to have a pretty close connection. You don't realize this now, but there was a period after Michael's [child molestation] trial where he was bouncing around Europe. Will actually flew out to Ireland and met Michael at this ranch he was staying at, and they worked on music together. They really bonded. Will got to know him. Later, Will encountered Michael in [Las] Vegas. My favorite story Will told me involves Prince and the rivalry he had with Michael. Nobody really quite knows the full extent of their rivalry, and I think both of those guys had an interest in keeping it somewhat mysterious because they are both mysterious dudes. But when Prince was doing his Vegas residency around late 2006, Michael was living in Vegas. Will was a guest artist at the Prince residency, but he was also friends with Michael. So Will arranged it for Michael to be a guest in the audience at Prince's show. No one knew it really, but Prince knew it. There was a point during the show where Prince was playing bass and he came out into the audience with this giant bass—he knew where Michael was sitting—and he walked right up to Michael and started playing bass in Michael's face. Like aggressive slap bass. The next morning, Will went over to Michael's house for breakfast, and they're talking about Prince and the show. And then Michael goes, 'Will, why do you think Prince was playing bass in my face?' Michael was outraged. And then started going on. 'Prince has always been a meanie. He's just a big meanie. He's always been not nice to me. Everybody says Prince is this great legendary Renaissance man and I'm just a song-and-dance man, but I wrote "Billie Jean" and I wrote "We Are the World" and I'm a songwriter too.' All this disrespect for Prince came out from Michael that morning. One day, I hope Prince sits down and tells the truth about everything between him and Michael. Before I die, I want to know what the full deal was between the two of them."

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