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A German inventor sold Ma her big inspiration: a large but transportable water tank. In it, barely clad nymphs (her daughters) would frolic for the pleasure of an audience (mostly men) who hadn’t come to see Shakespeare. Ma called her first revue “Splash Me!” It was prurient, and it sold well. The only problem, her grandson later claimed, was that the tank broke one evening and “eventually drowned the band. . . . Seriously drowned!” (Asked by the interviewer how someone could be “unseriously drowned,” the grandson was vague: “Yes, anyway . . .”)

Neither Peg nor Cissie Marks was a beauty, but they were young and in good enough shape, and they could always be supplemented by any interchangeable showgirl willing to appear nearly naked and drench herself for pay on a music hall stage. Historically, aquacades have not ranked high in the aesthetic hierarchy of live performance, but even in its own category “Splash Me!” challenged good taste, particularly when Ma directed the girls to eat bananas underwater. With “Splash Me!,” audiences throughout southern England knew precisely what they had come to see. So did local officials. But Ma got around whatever Watch Committee happened to have jurisdiction by tinting the water lighter or darker depending on the degree of likely censorship in that particular venue. Always cagey, she took a preemptively patriotic posture during World War I by dyeing the tank water red or white or blue and daring the prudes to criticize such a public-spirited celebration.

Water was not Ma Ray’s only medium. For many years she got her daughter Peg to stand onstage in a flesh-toned leotard. This seems to have been the essential point of the act, though its artistic justification took the form of Peg’s brother Bert projecting slides on her body that miraculously dressed her as any number of famous ladies—Queen Victoria, Elizabeth I, the Statue of Liberty. Peg appeared in other forms as well. One in particular, a chestnut skit starring Peg as a libidinous charwoman, served well as the warm-up for the water tank.

They were theater people, the Marks/Rays, and Ma was not overly concerned with her children’s sex lives, though she’s said to have set a strict moral tone during work hours. Peg attempted marriage with a fellow named Ayers, but it didn’t work, and soon she was single again and back with Ma. In 1921, with Peg a divorcee pushing twenty-five, Ma felt the need to go husband hunting on her daughter’s behalf. An added incentive for the matriarch was that her car, an enormous showy red thing, needed a driver. And so she found Bill Sellers.

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They were playing Portsmouth. Her new production (either “More Splashes” or “Have a Dip!,” there’s some dispute) had just opened at the King’s Theatre. It was the Roaring Twenties in England, which is to say that the tank water was clear and the censors weren’t troubled. Peg and Ma were seated in a café listening to the piano player’s rendition of “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” and Ma liked what she heard. She asked the man if he could drive a car and promptly hired him.

Bill Sellers—actually “Seller” at the time—was a Yorkshireman (Bingley, to be precise), a fact that couldn’t have worried Ma Ray, and he was a Protestant, which might have bothered her but didn’t. Bill did not possess a powerful personality. And it may have evaporated further after he married Peg. The writer and comedian Spike Milligan, who met him in the 1940s, once described him: “Bill, I think, is kept in the clothes cupboard. I see his cigarette smoke filtering through the keyhole. Poor Bill—the original man who never was; he looked a pasty white and reminded me of those people at Belsen.”

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Peg and Bill married in London at the Bloomsbury Registry Office in 1923. The marriage certificate lists the bride as “Agnes Doreen Ayers, formerly Marks”; the groom’s name is down as “Seller.” The ceremony was brief and the reception nonexistent, since Ma spirited Peg off immediately afterward