Wearing camel ballet flats, a Liverpool Youth Soccer League T-shirt, and faded jeans, Allison Sarofim sinks into a tatty-gracious, silk-velvet sofa at her renovated carriage house in New York��������s West Village. But she doesn��������t stay put for long.

The Texan heiress-actress has recently found success as a film producer. Yes, �������producer,������� this generation��������s new business card of the idle rich. But Sarofim is a different animal from the earphoned, Cipriani-esque pack. Watch her at one of her garden soirees, between the katsura trees and near the Henry Moore, and you��������ll see. She cooks her own hors d��������oeuvres, such as lobster rolls and mini-burgers. Her beefy Labrador retriever is seldom not at her side, or pushing a slobbered-on plush toy upon a guest. Cigarettes are permitted��������and doled out��������throughout her parlor. She��������s funny too, slipping into bawdy Southern slang like she was more from uptown New Orleans than debutante Houston.

She knows how to keep things moving, fast and unpretentiously, mixing her invite list with society icons, Hollywood brats, and up-and-coming bohemians. A Halloween party may include Valentino, Lara Flynn Boyle, Lindsay Lohan, Harvey Weinstein, and artist Hope Atherton. And there��������s always lots of pretty young things serving the pomegranate margaritas. All of this helps explain why she��������s able to traverse so effortlessly both the Upper East Side and Alphabet City, gracing the cover of tony Avenue one month, the pages of Paper the next. She��������s also a contributing tastemaker to the refined-but-sassy Domino. �������For someone without a proper 9-to-5 job,������� says Sarofim, an admitted vintage-designer addict, �������I sure am busy.�������

Of her upbringing, she says, modestly, �������My parents were low-key.������� Dad is Egyptian-born Houston money manager Fayez Sarofim. Mom, Louisa Stude Sarofim, is heiress to the Brown & Root construction fortune (now a subsidiary of Halliburton), and also runs the Menil Collection in Houston. When her daughter was growing up, Kirk Douglas was among the illustrious guests who would come over for supper. As some kids remember the Good Humor man, Sarofim has fond memories of �������Heather Watts and Damien Woetzel, from the New York City Ballet, doing high-altitude pirouettes on the trampoline in our yard,������� she says.

As a producer, she��������s proved to be quite the power broker. Lake City, a Southern drama from Sarofim��������s company, Sixty-Six Productions (with Hunter Hill and Perry Moore), stars Sissy Spacek, Troy Garity, and Rebecca Romijn. �������We shot in Richmond, Virginia,������� she says. �������It was fascinating to watch Spacek work. She came to the set with a U-Haul filled with tables and a quilt.�������

Among her other projects, Sixty-Six has a thriller in the pipeline, as well as a documentary about Maurice Sendak, codirected by Spike Jonze. Her boyfriend Stuart Parr is also in the business. Once known as a man-about-town, Parr is a dealer of modernist furniture, an erstwhile architect, and the producer of Eminem��������s Oscar-winning film 8 Mile.

Though born to be coddled, Sarofim can roll with the punches, quite literally. In a recent role, she was cast as �������a bar waitress who gets beaten up������� by Dave Matthews. �������There wasn��������t a lot of faking it,������� says Sarofim. �������He throws me up against a door and slams my face into a mirror.������� As an actress, she has played a centaur in The Chronicles of Narnia, an Upper East Side mom with an eating disorder in The Nanny Diaries, and a midwife in Prince Caspian, which filmed this summer in Prague.

The Renaissance woman cooks divinely, having interned under Eric Ripert at New York��������s four-star Le Bernardin. While Truman Capote once said, �������The rich serve such marvelous vegetables, little fresh-born things, scarcely out of the earth,������� Sarofim notes, �������The difference between a bistro and a four-star restaurant is the way you cut the vegetables. At a four-star restaurant, �������centimeter squares,�������� means with perfect right-angle corners.�������

A favored subject of paparazzi at black-tie events��������photographer-to-the-A-list Patrick McMullan is another intimate��������Sarofim can��������t help but sometimes feel like a society mannequin. �������I don��������t think photographers are interested in me; they��������re interested in the clothes. A lot of my friends are designers��������Peter Som, Zac Posen, Tory Burch��������and I like to celebrate their creativity.������� Typical of her various art-supportive endeavors, Sarofim recently brought a dance troop to perform in middle-of-nowhere Marfa, Texas. In fact, her pet project is Marfa��������s Ballroom Drive. �������I��������m on the board at the Ballroom,������� says Sarofim. �������This is cattle country, with lots of Army bases, and we��������re building a drive-in in the middle of the desert in conjunction with MoMA.������� We��������ll wager to bet, it won��������t be her last picture show.