Will Ex-Washingtonian Tessa Horst Find Love in 'The Bachelor'?

Since every "love match" on the show ends up on the rocks, we lost faith in "The Bachelor" and all those predictable bachelorettes -- until Tessa Horst, the former Washingtonian with an intriguing pedigree.

Until the show finishes out the season, ABC forbids Horst and her family to reveal anything about the choices made by bachelor Andy Baldwin,30, a naval medical officer stationed in Hawaii. Her show bio says only that she's a 26-year-old social worker from San Francisco -- but after plenty of "no comments," we've unearthed this much: Horst grew up in Washington (her dad is Thomas Horst, an international tax expert and former bigwig at Treasury) and graduated from Georgetown Day (1999) and Middlebury College (2003). The exotic brunette is a triathlete, skier, former waitress and possibly an heiress: Sources say her grandfather is one of the richest men in Hong Kong.

Horst, one of 25 women competing, said on the show that she decided to audition because she was ready for an adventure -- her mother, Romana, met her second husband on the Inca Trail. She's clearly ambivalent about the whole reality-dating concept; in the second episode, she told another bachelorette that she was already sick of the competition and wanted to go home. Her lack of desperation must have worked -- Baldwin has already proclaimed her "wife material."

Last night, Horst was in the background for most of the show, and she asked Baldwin not to keep her around if he wasn't feeling a connection between the two of them. So you know what happened -- she received the first rose, making it into the final six.

A Robe by Another Name: The Great Carry-on Coverup

It was a long, hard weekend for a lot of VIPs -- and maybe especially so for the woman behind the weekend's biggest, most lavish VIP party. Judith Czelusniak, head of public relations for Bloomberg LP and the maestra of the news service's over-the-top bash on Saturday night at the Costa Rican Embassy, dragged onto the US Airways shuttle back to NYC on Sunday evening with more than the FAA allows for carry-on -- her purse, her tote and a shopping bag packed with two plush bathrobes.

(Uh, bathrobes? Yes, you know: to dress the hot model types serving mini-bottles of champagne from an ice-packed bathtub. Didn't you have that at your party?)

No way, said a flight attendant: Gotta check one of those bags. Instead, Czelusniak ditched the shopping bag and put on one of the robes. "It's my coat," she said. A gallant money manager in the next seat donned the other. After some resistance from the gate agent, they got off with a scolding -- and enjoyed a snug ride back to New York.

HEY, ISN'T THAT . . . ?

• Sheryl Crow and Laurie David, a night after their verbal scuffle with Karl Rove, wrapping up their tumultuous D.C. weekend on Sunday at Charlie Palmer steakhouse on Capitol Hill. The two drew stares as they entered a private dining room with Larry David and an entourage from their enviro bus tour. Democratic operative Dan Gerstein, celebrating his 40th in the main room, asked the waitress to send over some kind of global-warming-themed cocktail -- the bartender whipped up a bright-red "hot fizzy tamale" -- and to say it was from Rove. Laurie David accepted the drink and, yes, laughed.

THIS JUST IN . . .

• At last! Former Postie Carl Bernstein's biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton -- first announced in early 1999, when we were all so young -- will hit shelves June 19, publishing house Alfred A. Knopf announced yesterday. Weighing in at 650 pages, "A Woman in Charge" will have a first printing of 350,000 copies and will arrive in stores just two months ahead of another big-deal HRC book, "Her Way," by New York Timesmen Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. -- a relative quickie, only in the works since early last year.