Answer #1: An entire book could be written about Howard Hughes' sex life. In fact, The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People by Irving Wallace (and family) devoted a section to him.
Howard’s uncle, Rupert Hughes, was a movie screenwriter. When he was 20 years old after he’d become sole owner of the Hughes Tool Company, Howard married Houston socialite Ella Rice and they moved to Hollywood, where, over the next 20 or so years, he produced a dozen or so movies.
It sounds like Hughes, a dashing risk-taking multi-millionaire young man, was a kid in a candy store in Hollywood. Only a few years after arriving, Ella Rice divorced Hughes and moved back to Texas.
That freed up Hughes to be linked to a succession of movie stars, both female and male, that included: Billie Dove, Bessie Love, Carol Lombard, Corrine Giffith, Ida Lupino, Lillian Bond, Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Fay Wray, Ginger Rogers, Rita Hayworth, Yvonne deCarlo, Linda Darnell, and Jane Russell, along with Cary Grant, Errol Flynn, Randall Scott, and Tyrone Power. There were, reportedly, many others, but those are the most famous of them.
Ava Gardner and Katharine Hepburn were also on his list; both of these relationships are explored in the recent movie The Aviator, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes. (Katherine Hepburn, also a notorious bisexual control freak, reportedly didn't like sex, so it’s a matter of conjecture how much actual nooky that Hughes and Hepburn ever engaged in.)
According to the biographer Charles Higham, Hughes was a "thoughtless dispassionate lover, seeking only control. His sexual partners weren’t so much lovers as hostages, prisoners, or victims of his will; he had to dominate in everything."
However, biographers Brown and Broeske claim that he was a quite accomplished and "eager-to-please sex partner" with a particular affinity for a technique that shall remain unspecified in this family-friendly feature.
In Boxes, the subject of the 6/23 QoD, which claims that Hughes was married to one Eva McClelland for 31 years, there’s not one single word about sex, which is quite conspicuous by its absence.
Answer #2: Howard Hughes’ father, Howard Hughes Senior, was Episcopalian. According to baptismal records dug up by biographers from a church in Keokuk, Iowa, where his beloved paternal grandmother Jean Hughes lived, Howard Junior was baptized as an Episcopalian there. Later on in his life, primarily due to his love of Las Vegas, Hughes surrounded himself with Mormon advisors, claiming they were the only people he could trust.
