Désirée Cousteau

Désirée Cousteau is the stage name of a pornographic actress and striptease artist who was active in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She is best known for her role in the 1978 film Pretty Peaches.

Pre-porn
Cousteau aspired to be a mainstream model, but was told she was not tall enough or thin enough to succeed. After a period modeling lingerie, she secured a small part in Jonathan Demme's 1974 debut Caged Heat, a women in prison film. She is credited as Deborah Clearbranch. In the same year she did a photo shoot for Penthouse magazine, again as Deborah Clearbranch, which was published in the June issue. She then dropped from view for a time, her career stalled.

Porn
In the late 1970s she began a relationship with Jeff Scheer, who would become her husband and manager. She got breast implants (rare at the time), performed as a go-go dancer, and looked for pornographic work. Her porn career began in 1978, when she did sex scenes in four films, initially with the hybrid stage name of Désirée Clearbranch, before taking a more substantial role in Bob Chinn's Hot and Saucy Pizza Girls, in which she has three sex scenes and something of a narrative arc. Pizza Girls was followed a couple months later by Alex de Renzy's Pretty Peaches, a film constructed entirely around Cousteau. It instantly established her as a porn star, a status confirmed when she won the Adult Film Association of America Best Actress Award for her performance the following year.

Other roles quickly followed, most trading on the dizzy naïf persona Cousteau created for Pretty Peaches (whose storyline was distantly derived from Voltaire's Candide). She made around twenty features and loops in 1979, as well as doing photo shoots for magazines such as Hustler and High Society. Cousteau's 1979 credits include scenes in three movies by French director Gérard Kikoïne. One was in the ambitious French-American co-production Aphrodesia's Diary, shot mostly in New York and not released until 1983, but the other two were shot in France (Cousteau's dialogue was dubbed).

Cousteau announced her retirement from porn films in an interview with Midnight Blue at an event to promote Deep Rub in the latter part of 1979. She appears, however, to have undertaken a few projects after that date, with a handful of loops and features in 1980 and 1981. All later films purporting to involve Cousteau use archival footage.

Colleagues including the actresses Seka and Annette Haven recall Cousteau's eccentric behavior on movie shoots. Cinematographer David Jennings considered her psychologically unsuited for pornographic work. Actor and director John Sleeman concluded that "she didn't like being in the business". This is the impression Cousteau gives in the Midnight Blue interview, in which she says she prefers striptease, "Because you're on a stage and you never have physical contact with anyone. I never leave the stage. So there's an isolation and a security there that I don't feel with films." In 1980 Cousteau said she could afford to slow down because her film work provided her with a salary and a percentage of profits, which would have been extraordinary in an industry where even the biggest stars were paid by the day.

Post-porn
At the time of the Midnight Blue interview, Cousteau was appearing at the Melody Burlesk in New York, which regularly featured porn stars in addition to its house dancers. By 1980 she had developed a one-woman show consisting of dance and striptease followed by a Q&A, which she performed in November at the Aquarius Burlesk in Gloucester City, New Jersey. Cousteau "was covered with a coat and led off stage" by police during a performance at the Parkway Theater in Milwaukee, but "the district attorney's office declined to issue charges". Undaunted, she appeared on New York cable television's The Robin Byrd Show in December and danced topless "in front of the single Ikegami camera" to promote her stage work.

Cousteau was still touring in the Fall of 1981. The venues were mostly X-rated cinemas and burlesque theaters in smaller cities and towns. She spent three weeks a month on the road and did up to five performances a day, including posing nude on patrons' laps for $5 a photograph (with Jeff Scheer as photographer). One such patron in Fort Wayne, Indiana was a vice squad officer, who arrested Cousteau for public indecency. She was identified at the time of her arrest (17 September 1981) as Deborah A. Scheer, aged 26, of Arvada, Colorado. After more than a year of physically gruelling live performance and at least two brushes with the law, she appears to have quit the adult entertainment industry by the end of 1981.

Cousteau's films remained staples of the shrinking X-rated cinema circuit in the 1980s and of cable television in the 1990s, as well as of X-rated home video. She was inducted into the XRCO Hall of Fame in 1993, and into the AVN Hall of Fame in 1997.

1974

 * Caged Heat (1974), by Jonathan Demme (Cousteau is credited as Deborah Clearbranch)

1978

 * The China Cat (1978), by Bob Chinn (Cousteau is credited mononymically as Clearbranch)
 * Easy (1978), by Anthony Spinelli (Cousteau is credited as Désirée Clearbranch)
 * A Formal Faucett (1978), by Fred J. Lincoln (Cousteau is credited as Désirée Clearbranch)
 * Telefantasy (1978), by Bob Chinn
 * Hot and Saucy Pizza Girls (1978), by Bob Chinn
 * Pretty Peaches (1978), by Alex de Renzy

1979

 * 800 Fantasy Lane (1979), by Svetlana Mischoff
 * Candy Goes to Hollywood (1979), by Gail Palmer
 * Aphrodesia's Diary (shot in 1979, released in 1983), by Gérard Kikoïne
 * Enquêtes (1979), by Gérard Kikoïne
 * Initiation au collège (1979), aka French Finishing School, by Gérard Kikoïne (as Loic Chalmain)
 * The Tale of Tiffany Lust (released in France as Dolly l'initiatrice in 1979, released in the U.S. in 1981), by Radley Metzger (credited to Gérard Kikoïne)
 * Deep Rub (1979), by Leonard Kirtman (as Leon Gucci)
 * Female Athletes (1979), by Leonard Kirtman (as Leon Gucci)
 * Getting Off (1979), by Ed De Priest
 * Hot Lunch (1979), by John Hayes (as Harold Perkins)
 * Hot Rackets (1979), by Gary Graver (as Robert McCallum) (Cousteau is credited as Désirée Clearbranch)
 * Inside Désirée Cousteau (1979), by Leonard Kirtman (as Leon Gucci)
 * Intimate Illusions (1979), aka Boiling Point, by Gary Graver (as Paul Levis) (Cousteau is credited as Danielle Hunnee)
 * Ms. Magnificent (1979), aka Superwoman, by Joe Sherman
 * Summer Heat (1979), by Christy McCabe and Charles Webb
 * The Ecstasy Girls (1979), by Gary Graver (as Robert Mc Callum)

1980

 * Randy (1980), aka Randy the Electric Lady, by Phillip Schuman and Zachary Strong

1981

 * Center Spread Girls (shot in 1981, released in 1982), by Gary Graver (as Robert McCulum)
 * Delicious (1981), by Bill Milling (as Philip Drexler Jr.)

Loops
Cousteau also appeared in loop collections such as Swedish Erotica (Caballero) and Electric Blue (Scripglow). Some of this material may have been recycled.