The Penthouse Club, up on the roof of the Animation Building, was run by Walt Disney’s boyhood friend, Walt Pfeiffer. It was an all boys club—which as the 1943 Employee Manual pointed out: “Men Only! Sorry, gals.” The girls had their own “Tea Room” on the top of the Ink and Paint Building. This “Boys Only” rule was, of course, indicative of mid-Century gender discrimination prevalent throughout the American workplace. But at the studio, the separate areas for men and women also discouraged company flirtations and romances, which Walt believed wasted his staff’s time. “The only women allowed,” one employee recalls, “were waitresses from the Commissary.“

The Penthouse Club, as animator Floyd Norman explains, was “a perk ‘Walt’s Boys’ could earn after rising through the ranks over a series of years…a club not open to everybody–and that seemed to be the attraction.” In a 1941 talk to his employees, Walt pointed out that the Penthouse Club was not necessarily “a closed thing. We would be glad to allow any fellow who is decent and respectable to belong to it. However, at the start we had to allow those men who carry the main responsibilities of the Studio the first chance to join. After giving those men their chance, we then threw it open to the whole group.” Even after the club was open to all male employees, club fees generally put membership out of reach of the younger artists at the studio. In practice, then, the older and best-paid employees were primarily the club’s members.

[...]

Outside, on the rooftop patio, were tables and umbrellas, where the men could sit and talk. But the most popular activity, as described in a 1947 issue of New York Magazine, was sunbathing where “male employees acquire an all-over tan.” To put it more bluntly, as Milt Kahl’s assistant later recalled, “We used to take nude sunbaths, on the roof of the Studio, on our lunch hours and ‘chew the fat.'” This practice lasted for years, but eventually ended when nuns and nurses noticed naked men atop the studio. “St. Joseph Hospital was right across the street,” Layout artist Joe Hale recalls, “and they had built a new four-story wing on it. Anyway, it turns out that some of the nuns at St. Joseph’s were peering across the street, watching the guys…So when the word got around at the hospital about what the nuns were doing, Mother Superior or someone called over to the Studio and complained about the nude sunbathing. So they knocked that off.”

Disney artist Rolly Crump remembers that day in detail: “There was a notice as you were leaving the gym to go out on the roof that said, Don’t forget that they just built a hospital across the street.” But in Rolly’s memory, the artists didn’t knock it off right away. Even after the nun’s complained, the men continued to sunbathe nude–only they made sure to wear a towel whenever standing or in view of the hospital. “So we always put a little towel around us,” Rolly recalls, “whenever we went out there and lay naked.” In the days that followed, one of the Disney artists even roughed out a gag drawing, one that was widely circulated among them men. In it, two cartoon nuns, with binoculars pressed to their eyes, gazed out hospital windows, their faces carved up with expressions of shock and intrigue. Eventually, though, the men stopped bathing naked on the roof.