Gold Coast people: Meet the Glitter Strip’s host with the most, Jimmy Ozturk

JIMMY Ozturk has worked in the heart of the neon-bathed Glitter Strip for almost four decades as a nightclub VIP frontman — and he has no plans to step out of the limelight any time soon.

Glitter Strip longest-serving and most stylish promotions manager Jimmy Ozturk has been working the front door of Surfers Paradise nightclubs for 35 or 36 years. This is his signature Facebook post when on shift out the front of Hollywood Showgirls

Y OU can’t miss Jimmy Ozturk. Not with that chunky, diamond-encrusted ring, or those polished black shoes with the shiny silver buckle, or the pressed three-piece suit with a handkerchief popping out the breast pocket or the Versace-esque collared shirt he has modified to his liking.

He sticks out like the neon signs lighting up the night along Orchid Avenue, the beating heart of Surfers Paradise and the Gold Coast Glitter Strip.

Come 8pm and Ozturk is like the street — coming alive. This is his patch, his turf, the place he plies his trade streetside as a VIP frontman and host without peer — a job he has done with aplomb without fading or even seemingly ageing for 35 years.

“He’s no tout. He doesn’t call out to anyone. He doesn’t have to.”

His current employer is another icon of the strip, Hollywood Showgirls, but you name a bar or nightclub, past or present in Surfers Paradise, and he has worked out the front — Rose and Crown, Bourbon Bar, The Penthouse, Avenue, Cheerleaders, 21, Shooters, Cocktails & Dreams, Central. The list goes on.

For 12 years he has been at Hollywood where he charms passers-by down the red carpet, up the stairs, through the mahogany front doors and into the VIP area where the first round is on him and this lovely, buxom waitress here will look after you from now on “my bro”.

Because after he’s settled you in with some banter, a cold drink and a few introductions, Ozturk is off back to his perch on the street, a promo girl in a sparkly red dress by his side, ready to charm some more.

One recent Friday, Coast Weekend tagged along for part of his shift.

He gets inundated by a constant stream of people — old friends, new friends, people wanting to show him off to their friends, show they know him, because he’s “Jimmy” and he’s dressed to the absolute nines and he’s just cool as all hell.

During one hour, three officers from separate police patrols break ranks to come over, shake his hand and ask how he is doing, scores of arriving Showgirls dancers give him a friendly hug and kiss on the cheek, a staff member from La Porchetta across the road brings him over a coffee and a pizza, and an untold number of passers-by and people from passing cars call out ‘Hey Jimmy!’.

Ozturk recalls when he first started promoting clubs in the 1980s he always did it in a “snappy suit”. “This was the way in Europe, in America, all the managers wear suits.”

He’s no tout. He doesn’t call out to anyone. He doesn’t have to.

“You make eye contact, I don’t yell. That’s for monkeys,” he explains.

“They will come to me.”

You can’t miss Jimmy Ozturk — and he doesn’t miss much either. He’s seen some of the Gold Coast’s most well-known and, in some cases, infamous identities grow up.

Before Peter Foster was a convicted conman, and before Travers Beynon was a self-styled playboy dubbed the Candyman and before Billy Cross was the founder of global male revue sensation Manpower and before Craig Duffy was the Australian pool and snooker champion, Ozturk knew them all as young bucks frequenting nightspots.

Duffy, now the owner of Hollywood Showgirls and Ozturk’s employer, says he can still remember when he first met the impeccably-dressed Turkish immigrant 32 years ago out the front of the then-Penthouse nightclub. It was above the Avenue, a Glitter Strip institution which has lasted as long as Ozturk.

“I used to sneak in there when I was under 18. Jimmy was on the door, streetside, milling around, always in a suit,” Duffy recalls.

“He’s a likeable personality, dresses immaculate, always positive, always happy.”

Always “happy days”.

It’s Ozturk’s favourite saying. His social media posts are littered with it. There are other endearing catchcries he has made his own.

Happy? He’s “as happy as the Larry!”

Young at heart? “Young looking! Touching the wood! Touching the wood!”

In 2004 when Duffy bought Santa Fe Gold off Cross and turned it into Hollywood Showgirls, Ozturk was almost part of the deal.

“He was already working there — he came with the furniture,” Duffy says, adding he hasn’t changed a bit.

“You expect to see him in a three-piece suit with a handkerchief, shiny shoes. If you saw Jimmy in jeans and T-shirt it would be totally weird.

“He doesn’t look out of place wearing a three-piece suit. That’s his image. It’s a good look for the business, it’s class, a bit old-school and what we’re about.”

Ozturk recalls when he first started promoting clubs in the 1980s he always did it in a “snappy suit”.

“This was the way in Europe, in America, all the managers wear suits.

“Then you come here and the managers are in T-shirt and jeans. I was modelling a lot so I was always in very good stuff.

“I tell all the young guys ‘You have to look good, dress smart’. It doesn’t matter how much money you have. When you dress well, you feel magic, you have more energy.

“I dress like I’m going to a ball.”

Duffy says in his view Ozturk is the most famous streetside VIP host in Australia and “easily the best”.

“You been on the street doing that job for so long, people across Australia know you. Some people go up there just to say hello to Jimmy and if he’s not working — because he has two nights off a week — they go ‘Where is Jimmy?’.

“Jimmy is a tourist icon. I travel interstate often and one thing people always ask me is ‘Is that immaculately dressed cool guy Jimmy still there?’.”

Veteran Gold Coast Bulletin gossip columnist Regina King says what you see today with Ozturk is what you always got: “ ... a nice man doing a very unusual job”.

She remembers him modelling at many big fashion shows locally.

“He was always ultra-polite, old school even in a courtly way.”

To Ozturk, his job isn’t unusual, just part of who he is, like a good suit.

“It is easy to me. Every night is my favourite,” he says, grinning away.

“I want to make it happen.”

“I love Jimmy. He used to spend $1000 a week with me. I made budget every month because of him.”

Away from the Glitter Strip glitz, Ozturk is a devoted family man, married, three grown children and three grandkids.

His wife Rhonda works as an English language skills lecturer at Griffith University.

Their working lives and social circles could not be more different.

She admits she is not friends with her husband on Facebook.

“I have 100s of international friends and they would really wonder about him. We just have separate jobs and separate lives and that’s probably why we have been happy for so many years,” she says, laughing.

“I just say he works in a nightclub and that’s it.”

During an interview with Coast Weekend, he cheekily introduces her as “the professor” but she’s not one and she scolds him good-naturedly for saying it.

They met in Turkey more than 40 years ago in the Grand Bazaar, Istanbul, where Ozturk’s family had a leather goods shop.

She was working on cruise liners and, as Ozturk likes to say, “she came in to buy a carpet and came out with a husband instead”.

“He was so handsome,” Rhonda says. “I just couldn’t believe it, he was so gorgeous and he was so persistent.

“He chased me around the Grand Bazaar, took me to all these different tea shops until I gave in and said I would go out with him.”

He took her for dinner at the Hilton and on her regular cruise liner stops back in Turkey they always met up. Six months later, he asked her to marry him but Rhonda says she wanted to test it was not just a holiday romance.

“So I took a job on another passenger liner, went to South Africa. He kept writing to me every couple of days so when I came back I went to Turkey and we got engaged.”

They lived in England for several years, with Ozturk working as a model for top fashion brands before eventually settling on the Gold Coast.

They have two sons, one on the Coast and one in the US pursuing an acting career. Their daughter is a successful cosmetic tattoo and beauty salon owner.

Rhonda attests to Ozturk’s tourism icon status

“He is so well known. We’ll go away and run into people who know Jimmy,” she says.

“We were overseas in Thailand, these young boxing blokes come up, ‘Hi Jimmy!’. We can go anywhere in the world and people will come up and say ‘Hi Jimmy!’. It really is quite bizarre. But he does stand out.”

She reveals at home they have special rooms — “not just closets” — for all his clothes: “He loves his clothes. He has so many it’s unbelievable. He has about 200 pairs of shoes and about a thousand shirts.”

A Gold Coaster, working in clothing retail in 2005, says Ozturk was her “best client”.

“I love Jimmy. He used to spend $1000 a week with me. I made budget every month because of him,” she says, adding he always bought expensive suits, never cheap ones.

“He was always fancy, always schmick and always really friendly.”

Hollywood manager Craig Pesco says it’s not a job he could do and he doesn’t know how Ozturk does it to 3am each night “at his age”.

“He’s been in high demand because he’s so well known for nothing more than who he is. Once he’s gone that will be the end of that style of street hustler. He’s the last of an old-school type of street promo guy,” Pesco says.

Ozturk won’t reveal his age and his eyebrows and forehead crease in feigned pain when asked.

“You don’t talk about that in this game bro,” he says. “Please don’t.”

Duffy reckons his frontman would rather die in the job than retire while Rhonda says: “They will have to kick him out before he goes”.

At one end of Orchid Avenue is a statue of ex-mayor Sir Bruce Small. Duffy and Cross both believe a statue of Ozturk should one day mark the other.

There won’t be a need any time soon — he has no plans to retire.

“I love to come to work — work is my pride. I’m feeling alive, like a tiger,” he says, eyes lighting up as he surveys the street, all the punters.

“I love it man, I’m always in the lights bro.”